


The Nearest Point to Follow

by frondescence



Category: Impulse (Comics), Young Justice (Comics)
Genre: Gen, don't even worry about it, just ignoring so much continuity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2019-09-19 19:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17007390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frondescence/pseuds/frondescence
Summary: Previously thought to have been lost to the Speed Force after the end of Mercury Falling, Thad Thawne is actually alive, living alone in a small cabin in the woods--until Bart finds him.





	1. The Dog

**Author's Note:**

> Continuity: out the window. More or less, anything after the end of Impulse/Young Justice didn't happen. Bart is still Impulse.

            Ninety miles south of Denver, Colorado, cicadas clung to the trunks of ponderosa pines and rang their hum and whine far through the dry air of late summer. Most days, as today, the sound was broken only by the occasional low groan of a semi rumbling along the rural highway that wound through the forest. Above the road, vultures perched in low branches, spreading their umbrella-like wings to catch every angle of the sun.

            They waited. Here, inevitably, raccoons and deer would venture onto the highway, having nowhere else to cross and lulled into security by the long stretches of time between oncoming cars. Most would cross successfully. Some would be crushed—tragic for the animals, but splendid for the vultures. For their survival. So they waited, statue-still and watching. They could be patient.

            They watched as a dog approached the road, weaving in and out of pungent shrubs that were hidden in the shadows of the pines. Smaller than a fawn, the dog was, but bigger than a raccoon. They’d all get a bite or two. They watched. They waited.

            The dog didn’t hesitate, as wild animals did, to tremble at the edge of the foul-smelling asphalt. It knew roads; it was of a different world. Stupid—careless—but good for the vultures. They watched it walk right onto the road, straight ahead, like it belonged there. And the vultures didn’t move—didn’t even blink. They already felt the semi coming. It rumbled up over the steep grade far faster than the dog could run. It would die soon—now.

            And then a red blur, fast as lightning. The dog was gone. The truck passed over and out of sight again. The vultures watched.

            Hunger burned in all their stomachs. But this happened sometimes; it was to be accepted. This was the life of a scavenger. They were content to wait, with watching eyes, for whatever would be crushed under the wheel next.

 

            Bart Allen wove down a line of pine trees, clutching the dog in his arms.

It wasn’t a huge dog, but it was bigger than his, and awkward to carry. Dogs were all angles and elbows. Or knees. Sturdy. Not like cats—cats were slippery and smushy, and you could bundle lots of them together in your arms, if you had to. If you were carrying them from a burning building, for example. Before they noticed and got angry and started scratching.

            The dog’s face changed by degrees, slowly realizing it had been moved and was still moving. Dogs had funny, bewildered faces, but in a minute, it would start to squirm in his arms, and why was he still carrying this dog, anyway? He couldn’t really see where he was running, and even though the trees were pretty far apart, there were still shrubs whacking at his shins and ankles as he ran through them.

            He slowed to a jog, and then to a walk, before he stopped. People didn’t like it when you stopped all at once; it made them sick. He didn’t want to make the dog sick, either. He wasn’t sure if dogs got motion sickness, but cleaning dog barf off his uniform was _so_ not how he wanted to spend the rest of his day.

He set the dog on the ground, and without the Speed Force thrumming so intensely through his veins the world tick-tocked forward, a little bit. Time didn’t crawl forward as slowly when he was standing still as it did when he ran. Still slower, though, than it was for everyone else. He knew this because everyone talked slowly, and because he’d lost his speed a couple times, and felt what it was like to be—everyone else. Everyone except the Flashes. And Max, and the Quicks…

            Plus, the VR he’d lived in as a—child? baby?—had been matched to his speed. Sped up for him.

            Once, when he was younger, Max had taken him out to a forest like this. Probably they were actually in Mongolia or Greece or something; his memory of it was fuzzy, like he hadn’t really been paying attention.  He just remembered that the trees were maybe about this tall, and that it had been hot. He remembered…

            “Look around,” Max had said. “No speed. Tell me what you see.”

            And Bart tried; he really did. He looked around and around at the trees, though they all just looked like trees to him. He knew there were lots of different types of trees, but he didn’t know what they were. Max probably did. He watched a bird leave its nest, which was more interesting than the trees, and he told Max so.

“What’s interesting about it?” Max said. “Tell me.” He looked at Bart the whole time, and not at the bird, which made Bart nervous. Max had a habit of asking questions like Bart should know the answers to them, except he usually didn’t.

            “It—it…I dunno,” Bart said. His feet itched; he wanted to zip up for a closer look, but Max had said no speed, so he stayed rooted. A bug crawled around his shoe.

            “The way its wings…move,” he said. The answer felt inadequate as he said it, and Max said nothing, only went _hm_. Bart looked at the bird again, which was now flying overhead.

            It was something about the musculature, the way the breast muscles stretched like hammocks through the bones of the wing. Something about that interested him. His fingers fluttered at his sides as he considered it, but he couldn’t find the words.

            “This is—”

            _This is hard!_ he nearly snapped, but he bit it off. He didn’t want to fight with Max. For once, he didn’t.

            Max smiled, just a little bit. “I know,” he said.

            Now, in the present moment, Bart really did want to stop and look for a while. The cushiony forest floor was dappled with light, and the light was always shifting, moving around and highlighting different spots every second. And the trees moved. The movement was subtle at the base of the trunks, but if he craned his neck and looked to the top, they swayed slowly and wildly in the wind. All the leaves rustled together, silvery at the edges, like tinsel.

            He hadn’t thought about that day with Max in a long time. Like most of his memories with Max, it made him happy and sad all at once to think about. And confused. Looking back on those days, he often felt like there was something Max had been trying to tell him, just dangling in front of his face. But Bart had never grasped it, and Max had taken it with him to the Speed Force, locked away and out of reach.

            The dog sniffed at his shoes. The dog! He laid his hand on its head and scratched behind one ear, and the dog’s tongue flopped out of its mouth happy-like. The friendly dog.

            Something like a mutt with some golden retriever in it. Or yellow lab…? He couldn’t ever remember which was which. It did have a collar on—nice detective work to notice _that_ , he thought—and he crouched to examine it.

            _Ivan_ , was all it said. No address.

            “Hmm,” Bart said. “You’ve gotta belong to _some_ one.”

            He scooped Ivan up off the carpet of pine needles and then his body was humming again, a purring engine ready to move. He zipped back to the road where he’d grabbed Ivan—or a similar road, at least—and crossed into the woods on the other side.

            A few zips up and down the forest and he found a smaller road, a gravel county road perpendicular to the highway. But he ran alongside it, not on it, because gravel kicked up at high velocity was bad news.

            He passed a few houses with long, tree-shaded driveways. None of them appeared to be dog owners—no fences, no dog doors—although _he_ had a dog and he didn’t have a fence or a dog door, so maybe that didn’t mean much. Some houses already had dogs. But there wasn’t a limit on how many dogs you could have. Eventually he just started pausing in front of each house—even backtracking to a few—and pausing, waiting to see if Ivan would react. He assumed he would—bark, or something—when it saw his place. But Ivan didn’t do anything special, so Bart kept moving on.

            And then, with a driveway so overgrown it was nearly invisible, he found a small cabin—just a few rooms, it looked like from the outside, and pretty new-looking compared to some of the other run-down old houses on that road. The house sat on small parcel of land closed-in by wild trees and long grass. A chopping block out front, with a woodpile drying nearby, neatly stacked. And out back was a doghouse, perfect and square with a roof just like the ones in cartoons. Carved into the wood above the doghouse door: IVAN.

            Bart grinned. Simple victories were the best kind, he’d always thought.

            He carried Ivan up to the front door and balanced him awkwardly against one arm and one hip as he tried to knock with the other hand. But the dog squirmed and writhed, and his hard claws scrabbled against Bart’s side, so he set him down and _then_ knocked.

            Silence, for a while. Bart reminded himself to be patient. Somewhere nearby, a woodpecker drummed against a tree. Then footsteps from inside the cabin moved toward the door. Bart grinned. He wanted to see how happy it made someone, that he’d found their dog.

            The door swung open on creaky hinges, and Bart saw his own face.

            It was like time stopped, or more like all the gears turning in Bart’s head got jammed up with chewing gum and froze in place. He stared, for a long time, at his face, his own light freckles and unusual, 30th-century-yellow eyes. It was like looking in a mirror—except for the hair. Blond. Bart’s heart dropped down somewhere deep in his guts.

            His face—the other face—stared back. Then rapid-fire flickers of shock—disgust—panic—and the door slammed shut.

            And Bart stared at the door. Unsure of what to do. Unable to process—this.

            Ivan was apparently satisfied and wandered over to his house.

            Bart decided to do the same.

 

            Only he didn’t go home.

            He intended to; he angled at first in the direction of his Alabama apartment. But he was too restless; he needed to run this off. And he didn’t know what he’d say to Cissie, his roommate. Or benefactor, as she liked to call herself, since, to be honest, she paid most of the rent.

            Wally. He could talk to Wally, maybe, but something held him back from the idea. He ran west, flashing over California, tearing out over the Pacific Ocean where his footsteps made a little suction-y noise with each step.

            No, not Wally. Not Jay, either. They wouldn’t understand; they were too wrapped up in the legacy to…to what? Bart sped by a cruise ship and glanced his hand through the crest of the ship’s wake. All the resulting little droplets glittered in the sun. He really wanted to talk to Max, but…

            Helen, maybe? He slowed, a little, and his feet got wet, sinking down below the surface of the water. He picked up again. Helen always knew what to do—but even as he turned around and angled back toward his old home, as he crossed back over land, over the Rockies, over the Mississippi into Alabama, he changed course again, just slightly.

 

            Carol sat at the plain wooden desk in her dorm room, jotting notes from a pair of open chemistry textbooks in front of her. The little drugstore TV by her desk played some reality show on one of the handful of cable networks the university offered residents for free. She wasn’t really paying attention, she told herself; it was just background noise. But she kept her eyes steadfastly on the pages. If she looked up at the episode of Catfish or Teen Mom or whatever it was, she’d be hooked, no matter how stupid.

            A tap on her window. She got up, slipped on a robe from the back of her chair, and looked down through the darkness. Speaking of stupid….

            Bart stood three stories below, waving up at her. In costume.

            She sighed. He was lucky her roommate was gone, as usual.

            A few minutes later, she met him downstairs, in front of the building. It was late, so the entrance was quiet and dimly-lit, but she’d asked him before—multiple times—to change out of costume _before_ showing up at her very public dorm.

            She nearly said so again. But there was something weird about his smile. Without a word, she hooked her arm around his shoulder, and he scooped his arms under her knees, and a second later they’d zipped up to the roof of the building.

            He was sat cross-legged on the ground. She followed suit, eyeing the way his hands fidgeted in his lap—at super-speed, a blur around the edges of his fingers. Something was up. She opened her mouth.

            “Whatareyoudoing?” he asked. The words flew out of his mouth in a jumble it took her a moment to process.

            “What…am I doing?” she repeated. “Just studying. I have an exam Wednesday.” He looked over the top of her head, which meant he was thinking, which meant he wasn’t paying attention. But then, to her surprise, he met her eyes with a look of obvious confusion.

            “Exam? But it’s August.”

            She tucked her knees into the bottom of her robe. “Exam,” she said, “but not a final.”  Bart only had a vague understanding of how college worked, having elected not to go.

            “Oh,” he said.

            “You forgot to change again,” she pointed out. Bart looked even more baffled by her saying this, until she reached out and tugged at his sleeve. It snapped against his skin when she let go.

            “Oh,” he said. “Yeahyeahyeah, secret identity, sorry.” His knee bobbed up and down.

            “What’s wrong?” she asked. The hum of the generator was loud behind them, and plumes of steam rose from the vents into the night sky.

            He puffed out his cheeks like he was chewing on something, or like he was ready to spit. She’d seen him try to spit before, jokingly emulating the boys at their high school who dipped tobacco and left water bottles full of black spit around the parking lot. Mostly he’d ended up with spit running down his chin.

            The blurring of his fingers stopped, and his knee slowed from a bob to a small jiggle.

            “I was running around,” he said. “I found a dog.”

            Carol waited for him to continue.

            “I think, uh,” he said. “I think I saw…Thad?”

            “Thad…?” she said. It took her a second to remember—not because she’d forgotten, but because it had been years. “Oh. _Oh_. Wait, really?”

            Bart nodded. In the darkness, it was hard to see through the yellow goggles that shielded his eyes.

            “How?” Carol asked. “Where? I thought you said he was lost in the Speed Force.”

            “I—we thought he _was_ ,” Bart said. “Max said…it’s almost impossible to make it out. Not unless you know what you’re doing. But I saw him in…Montana, I think. Or Colorado. He lives in a little cabin in the woods and he has a dog.”

            “What did Wally say?”

            “I didn’t…tell Wally,” Bart said. “Not yet.”

            “What did you do? I mean, are you sure it was him?”

            “I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted. “I just left. But, yeah. Unless—” He cocked his head. “Could it be someone else? Like another clone or a lost time scout or—”

            Carol laid a hand on his knee. Her mind was racing, but it was nothing, she was sure, compared to what was going on in Bart’s head. “Let’s work under the simplest explanation for now. But you should make sure.”

            Bart nodded—then stopped. “How?”

            “Well, Wally or Jay could—”

            “No!” Bart cut in. “They don’t—they can’t—” He made vague shapes in the air in front of him, as if trying to model a concept for Carol he couldn’t express in words.

            “I don’t think he wants to _hurt_ anyone,” Bart said. “He’s just…living. He has a dog.”

            “He had a dog when he was posing as you,” Carol pointed out, gently. But Bart shook his head.

            “Wally wouldn’t understand. They’re all too caught up in the whole…” He made more vague shapes. “The whole _Thawne_ thing.”

            Carol’s stomach curled a little at the name. She was more than a little bit caught up in the ‘Thawne thing’ herself, having seen the future, and President Thawne…

            But she kept her face neutral.

            “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Why don’t you…sneak in when he’s not there? Vibrate through the walls. See if there’s anything in his house that’s…I dunno…” She trailed off, unsure of where this plan was going. If Thad really was just living his life—but it seemed wrong not to check. To make absolutely sure.

            Bart nodded. But his lips twitched like he wanted to say something else. She waited.

            “Will you come, too?” He asked, quietly. Quiet was rare for Bart. Quiet, for Bart, usually meant serious.

            Carol thought of the books on her desk, the pile of flashcards. But she knew the material well enough, and her grade in the class was good already, and, really, none of that mattered more than her always-best-friend-sometimes-more.

            He watched her with a wide-open face—the kind of face that couldn’t hide anything even if it wanted to. Below the roof, from the front of the building, voices drifted up through the humid air. Other students, coming back from night classes or maybe leaving for parties. Silly, inconsequential conversations. She nodded.

            “Okay,” she said. “Let me change.”


	2. The Cabin

            It never ceased to amaze her how running west seemed to turn back time.

            The sunset lifted, night turning back to dusk, and Carol watched it happen because she’d long since learned to keep her eyes open despite the terrifying speed. Partially because she didn’t want to miss any of the casual magic of moving faster than sound, though she couldn’t really focus her eyes on anything other than the largest reference points, like the sky or mountains. Partially, too, because she got motion sick with her eyes closed.

            And then they were in a pine forest. She slid down from Bart’s arms and took off her cheap goggles. Dimly, through the trees, she could see a dark, hunched structure, and if she hadn’t known there was a cabin there, she might have assumed it was a fallen tree or a pile of rocks in the half-light. A dog barked somewhere in that direction, a thin sound that wisped through the dry air. And there was a thin clunk-clunking, a steady rhythm that stopped every few beats and then resumed.

            Carol raised a pair of binoculars to her eyes.

            God, she’d so badly wanted for Bart to be wrong. Not that she wanted anyone _dead_ , but—Thad’s time in their lives, masquerading as Bart—it was like something out of a horror movie. Worse, a horror movie she hadn’t realized her part in until it was nearly too late. It _had_ been too late—from Bart’s account of it, Thad had come chillingly close to success, and it was all a little hard to swallow.

            But all she saw now was a blond version of Bart splitting wood in front of his cabin. The ax came up, down with a practiced regularity. Swinging, wedging in the log, splitting. He looked…normal. It would be funny if it wasn’t so unsettling.

“He’s out front,” she said, lowering the binoculars. “We could go around the back?”

            Bart scooped her up again. They made a wide circle around the back of the house—not at full speed, but slower, more quiet—and then she felt a familiar whole-body tremor, like teeth rattling all over. Together, vibrating, they slipped through the back wall, and then he set her down and her body fell together again.

            An aluminum chair sat by a wooden table, neither matching each other in the slightest. Glass containers of sugar and flour, antique but clean, on the counter; a little wood-burning stove, topped with one copper pot and one pan, both badly dented and scratched; an old-fashioned coffeepot on the stove, a mug, a neatly-sealed bag of coffee grounds to the side. A few neatly-folded dishrags. A broom and dustpan leaning in the corner.

            “He’s so…neat,” Carol whispered. It all seemed—harmless. Hard to reconcile. Absently, she fingered her pocket, where she kept a little pink can of pepper spray. Bobby had bought it for her before her first day of college.

            Bart zipped over to the stove and jerked his thumb toward the heavy door. “Talk about primitive.”

            “Everything in this century seems primitive to you, future boy.” She crouched by a cabinet and pried it open. There wasn’t much inside—a large bag of rice and some big baking potatoes and onions. She shut the door.

            “Yeah, but—” Bart said. “Why doesn’t he have a regular stove?”

            Carol hummed. “He doesn’t have a fridge, either. I don’t think he has electricity.” She brushed her fingers over a spice rack on the wall. “Maybe he’s living off the grid.”

            Bart flung open and shut the rest of the cabinets; from his silence, she assumed he didn’t find anything interesting. The steady wooden thunk-thunk and barking continued from outside.

            Carol pointed at the living room beyond the kitchen, and the two of them moved without speaking.

            A small couch—old-looking, sagging in the middle like its frame had outlived its intended use—was draped with a folded throw blanket, colors worn and fabric pilling. A coffee table with a single book lying on top and a small, raggedy rug on the floor underneath. A pair of dog bowls in one corner, and in the opposite corner, a bookshelf, stuffed with books and organized, Carol noted, by both subject and author.

            “How did he stand pretending to be you?” she joked, running her finger over one of the shelves; it came away dust-free. “Your room must have driven him crazy.”

            “Carol, look,” Bart whispered. She turned; he was examining the book on the coffee table. She ducked below the window facing the front yard and peered over his shoulder, though she had to stand on tiptoes to do it.

            _The Life Story of the Flash_ by Iris Allen.

            “What are you doing?”

            Before Carol could react—before she could even jump—Bart had spun them both around to face the front door, his body angled in front of hers.

            Thad stood in front of the door.

            Carol palmed her pepper spray. He snorted.

            “Oh, _right_ ,” he said. “Bucklen, if I wanted to kill you, I’d have done it already.”

            She bit down on the inside of her cheek. She wished she didn’t have the urge to inch closer to Bart, but the truth was, Thad scared her—and he knew it.

            “Hey,” Bart barked. Thad looked back at him, and his frown deepened.

            “You didn’t answer me,” Thad said. He leaned back against the wall, his arms crossed, but he looked—stiff. Flighty. Ready to run. The dog still barked outside. “What are you doing?”

            “I…” Bart glanced at Carol, and she shrugged in response. What did he expect her to do?

            Bart held the book up in front of him. “Why do you have this?” he asked.

            “Idiot,” Thad said, “I’ve always had that.”

            “Oh,” Bart said.

            Carol clenched her fists, willing her hands to stop shaking. Thad was dangerous, and unlike Bart, he knew how to manipulate people. It wasn’t that Bart was dumb—Bart was remarkably smart, actually—but there had always been a gap between what was happening in Bart’s head and what was happening in the real world. Less so now than when she first met him—when he was essentially a toddler—but he still lived a little bit in his own world. Bart could never pull off a months-long impersonation of someone else; he could barely keep his own secret identity a secret.

            That difference is what scared her. But she stepped forward.

            “Listen,” she said. “Bart was just surprised to see you. He wanted to check on you. Right, Bart?”

            “Uh—yeah!” Bart said. “I kinda thought you…uh…”

            Thad looked him up and down. “ _You_ wanted to check on me.”

            “Yep.” Bart stood ramrod-straight, the way he did when he was lying.

            “And who sent _her_ along?”

            “Sent…?”

            “Nobody sent us,” Carol said. Her own voice reminded her of how she used to soothe her little sister when she was young and throwing tantrums. She modified. “We just wanted to make sure you were…”

            When she didn’t finish the end of the sentence—she couldn’t think of a way that wouldn’t offend—he scoffed.

            The room was growing dark around them; no lights were installed in the cabin, and the sun was setting—again. It was harder now to see Thad’s face, with the window behind him.

            Then there was a blur, a breeze, the electricity in the air—and she moved—she couldn’t tell what happened first, Thad moving or Bart hoisting Carol onto his back. But then Thad appeared back where he’d been standing moments ago.

            “Will you relax?” He sneered. A camping lantern blazed to light in his hands. “It’s getting dark.”

            Bart’s grip loosened on Carol, and she slid down from his back, giving him a little pat between the shoulders as her feet touched the ground.

            “Can you blame me?” Bart asked.

            “Can I _blame_ you?” Thad said. “For a lot of things, yes.”

            The light from outside continued to vanish, and the lantern cast an unsettling stark shadow on everything in the room.

            “Okay,” Thad sighed. “Grife. You’re not leaving, are you?”

            “Nope.”

            Thad grumbled. It sounded like something in Interlac, but Carol didn’t remember enough of it to understand.

            “Fine,” he snapped. “Do you want some tea?”

            Bart and Carol exchanged a look. Tea? They found someone who was supposed to be dead, someone trained from birth to kill Bart, and did they want _tea_?

            “Uh—sure,” Bart said.

 

            Bart and Carol sat on the couch while Thad built a fire in the woodstove.

            Bart kept giving her looks that she was sure he meant to be full of meaning, but she couldn’t even begin to decipher them. Instead, she watched Thad through the doorway to the kitchen, because the sight was so bizarre that she couldn’t look away. He stacked wood into the stove, stuffed it with newspaper, and lit a match that briefly illuminated his face. For the moment she could see it, he didn’t look angry; he wasn’t sneering or frowning. He just looked…tired. In the darkness, where the color of his hair faded in the shadows, he looked just like Bart looked in a quiet moment.

            Carol grabbed Bart’s hand. She needed the solidity of it, something to anchor to.

            Once the fire had caught enough to pop and crackle in the stove, Thad disappeared for a moment, and returned with a kettle that Carol assumed was full of water. She briefly wondered whether he had a well. But anywhere within a hundred miles with a tap would be just as convenient.

            She didn’t like turning her back on him, but realistically—logically—it didn’t matter whether she kept an eye on him or not. He moved faster than she could blink.

            Should she be more frightened? She was unsettled; it was an unsettling situation. But the tension had—not passed, exactly, but taken a break. Gone down with the sun, maybe. She looked around the room, but she couldn’t see much detail in the lantern-light. Only shapes.

            She looked back at Thad. He was just—staring at the kettle. Waiting for it to boil. That was something Bart could never do. She relaxed.

            A few minutes later, Thad returned with two mugs. He handed one to Carol, kept one for himself, and resumed his place by the door, leaning against the wall.

            “Hey,” Bart protested.

            “You don’t like tea,” Thad said. He took a sip of his own. “And you,” he said to Carol, “like honey but no milk.”

            Carol’s stomach seized, but she took a sip anyway. Sweetened with honey. When she was a teenager, she drank tea before school, when Bobby had his coffee, before Bart—and Thad, in Bart’s place—walked with her to school…

            “The Speed Force spat me out,” Thad said. Each word was pinched off, like he didn't want to speak. “I don’t know why. But I ended up here. So I built a house.” He took a long sip. “That’s it.”

            Carol set her tea down. “Why didn’t you go home?”

            Thad snorted. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a transport to the 30th century?”

            She bit the inside of her cheek. She knew _exactly_ how hard it was. But she didn’t want to tell him that; she didn’t want him to know more about her than he already did.

            “I lost Cray—my Craydl interface,” Thad said. “I had no way to contact anyone. Besides…” He paused and took another long drink. “I’m supposed to kill you, Allen. I can’t go back if I don’t.”

            “So why don’t you?” Bart asked. “Kill me,” he clarified after a moment.

            “You are so stupid,” Thad said. He didn’t answer beyond that.

            Bart eyed Carol’s tea. She wondered if he was tempted to taste it. But Thad was right—he wouldn’t like it. He didn’t like anything bitter.

            She and Bart had gone to prom together.  By that point they had dated and broken up and dated and broken up—never dating for more than a couple months at a time—because neither of them ever quite knew how to label the feelings they had for each other, and because usually they decided that best-friendship was easier. But neither of them had prom dates. Not that it mattered to Bart, or her, but Preston convinced him that Carol needed someone to go with.

            It was fun enough, for a little while—she and Bart and a couple other friends left early to get McDonald’s, because none of them cared for the music or the way their classmates danced—but what Carol remembered most about that day was that Helen had helped her with her hair and makeup and dress shopping. It was like having a mom again, almost. And the feeling of Helen’s fingers working through her hair, weaving tight braids against her scalp while Bart flitted and chattered about—it was one of the deepest comforts she’d ever felt. She thought about it often.

            She thought about it now, though she didn’t know why.

            “So-o-o,” Bart said, looking back at Thad. “Aren’t you lonely?”

            Thad froze. Carol forced herself to keep drinking tea, even though it blistered across the back of her tongue and she didn’t really want it anymore.  

            “We won’t come back if you don’t want us to,” Bart said. “But _I_ would be lonely.”

            Silence loomed over the room. Just three bodies, breathing in the dark.

            Carol had noticed long ago that Bart’s eyes seemed to glow, ever-so-slightly, in low light. She knew it was just a trick of the color, but it was one of many demonstrations of his difference and displacement in the 21st century. Now two pairs of yellow eyes, highlighted by the lantern between them, mirrored each other. Four endless reflections. And Carol, apart from them, felt dull and dark. This wasn’t her moment. She wanted to blend back into the shadows of the couch cushions.

            Thad still didn’t respond. But he didn’t say _no_.

            “Okay.” Bart looked at Carol. “Ready?”

            She nodded. He scooped her up.

            In the second before they bolted, she thought she saw Thad’s mouth working, opening to speak—and then they were gone.

 

            “It’s all so…strange,” Carol said, sitting on the end of her bed. Bart sat in her desk chair, though ‘sat,’ she thought, would be a generous description of the upside-down way he’d arranged himself.

            “Yeah,” Bart agreed. His hair fell like a waterfall from his head, and he picked at something on the floor that Carol couldn’t see. “But it doesn’t really seem like he’s doing anything bad.”

            “Yes, but…” Carol searched for the right words. “He’s a very good liar, Bart.”

            Bart was quiet. He kept picking at whatever he had found on the floor, and she hoped he wasn’t prying up the edge of the linoleum.

            “Why did you bring me along?” Carol asked. The question had been nagging at her all evening. “Why not—Superboy, or Robin, or someone else?”

            He sat all the way up, his hair flopping over his eyes. “Did you not wanna?”

            “No, I did, it’s just—it’s not like I could do anything to him. If he—did anything.”

            Bart folded his arms over the back of the chair. Thinking. Carol wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, waiting for him to speak.

            “Because you’re…the only one who figured it out,” he said, quietly. “You were the only one. Young Justice didn’t, and Max and Helen didn’t…and I didn’t want…” His voice faded to a murmur.

            “Oh,” Carol said. She slid down from the bed, her feet hitting the cold floor with a _plat_. “Hey.” She widened her arms, and as soon as he glanced up at her, he zipped in for a tight hug.

            He was warm—always warm, bordering on feverish. It was a Flash thing, he’d told her. She wrapped the edges of her blanket around his back.

            Bart was a tactile person; he enjoyed hugs. She wondered, briefly, how many times either of them—Bart or Thad—had ever been _touched_ as children, in the 30th century. Not “touched” by VR, nor by AI, but by a real person who loved them.

            Bart more than Thad, she was sure. At least he’d had Iris.

            “What’s next?” she asked. She could feel his heart fluttering—not alarmingly fast, but faster than an athlete’s resting heart rate should be. Another Flash thing.

            “I…dunno.” The sound hummed in his chest, against her cheek. His breath was warm on the top of her head.

            “I think,” she said into his shoulder, “that you need to tell someone eventually. Just in case. But I trust your judgment, speedy.”

            A key slid into the lock of the front door. Bart slipped out of her grip, still in costume. The doorknob turned.

            “Later,” he whispered, and was gone.

            As her roommate, Jeanne, came in, Carol sat at her desk and absently shuffled piles of flashcards around. She really should go back to studying—but her mind was buzzing.

            “Hey.” Jeanne flopped onto her bed. “Were you talking to someone?”

            “Just the phone.” Carol gestured toward her phone. “Telemarketer.”

            They chatted for a while about their classes and weekend plans, but Carol’s mind wandered. She kept glancing to the window.

            It would have been easy for Thad to follow them—to learn where she lived. The darkness outside the window loomed opaque and uneasy; the glare of lights on the glass sent a creeping down her neck. But he’d said it himself, and he was right: if he wanted to do anything, including track her down, he could have done it a long time ago. He knew where her brother lived, back in Manchester, and it would have been easy to follow the trail from there.

            It wasn’t a reassuring thought.

            Jeanne wandered off and Carol put away her books with a sigh. There was no way she could study more tonight; instead she dragged out a sketchbook and pencils and drew absent shapes and loops to calm her worried mind.

            Part of her was irritated at Bart—not for coming to her, and not for putting her in danger, but for bringing all this complication into her life in the middle of the semester. It was stupid and small and she didn’t like feeling it. Her pencil made dark scribbles on the page. Jeanne didn’t understand why Carol studied so hard, but unlike Jeanne’s, Carol’s tuition was funded almost entirely on academic scholarships. Bobby wouldn’t let her get a job, and he sent her money every week for food and necessities, but there was no way he could afford tuition on his own. If she didn’t work hard, she’d lose her scholarships. Simple as that.

            Her sketches had coalesced from frantic scribbles into slow, vague figures. Jeanne returned in her pajamas.

            “Okay if I turn out the lights?” she asked.

            Carol flipped on her desk lamp. “Go ahead.”

            The room went dark, Carol’s desk and paper and hands bathed in soft yellow light. Jeanne’s bed creaked as she climbed in.

            Carol’s thoughts dissolved into the soft whistling of Jeanne’s breath and the scratching of lead on paper. She drew a series of straight, tall lines, shaded with stubbly bark. A scratchy carpet of needles underneath.

            A dark, distant little house and a wispy white plume of smoke.


	3. The Plants

            Bart went looking for trouble to clear his head. Over an hour, he stopped three robberies and six muggings, extinguished a small fire, and pulled a cat out of a tree.

            Simple stuff, for the most part. People broke the law, you stopped them. People needed help, you helped them. Thinking about Thad gave him a headache.

            Probably most people would have something funny to say about that. He didn’t get a lot of the jokes Kon or other people told about him, but he didn’t really mind not getting it. They could make weird jokes if they wanted.

            Anyway, he thought, yanking a kid out of the street and onto the sidewalk, his head wasn’t any more clear than it had been before, and he was tired. He turned around and headed back to Alabama—home.

            When he phased through the door—it was faster than using the knob—Cissie was lounging on the couch, in the dark, illuminated by the flickering TV and bundled in about a million different blankets. A half-eaten bag of popcorn slumped on the floor by her feet.

            Bart collapsed on the couch next to her and grabbed the bag. “You gonna finish this?”

            She jumped, but only a little—she insisted she didn’t mind when he zipped around; she’d long since gotten used to it. She turned to him with sleepy eyes.

            “Nah, go ahead.”

            Bart tipped the bag back into his mouth. It was kettle corn, which he didn’t like, but he was too hungry to care. He hadn’t eaten since—well, dinner.

            “How was it?” she asked, sinking further into her blanket cocoon. She was watching some old black-and-white horror movie, something with a lot of guts and gore in it. Cissie liked weird movies.

            “How was…?” he asked through a mouthful of kettle corn. Did she know? How could she know?

            “Your _day_ ,” she said, grabbing a handful of popcorn. “How was your day?”

            “Oh,” Bart said. “Uh, okay. I mean—weird.”

            “Hmm,” Cissie said. Her attention had pulled back to the movie. “Weird how?”

            Bart’s legs bobbed up and down. On the screen, someone pulled a string of intestines out of someone else, which Bart knew was really just sausages and fake blood.

            “Do you remember when Inertia took my place so he could take Max into the Speed Force and kill him?”

            Cissie frowned, reached for the remote, and paused the movie. The freeze-frame on the old VCR stuttered in place, jittering up and down on a still image of those fake guts with two big muscular hands gripping them like ice cream cones.

            She turned to look at him.

            “I found him,” he said. He ripped up the popcorn bag into shreds and licked the extra seasoning off the sides.

            Cissie wrapped her hands around her knees. She had the same look on her face that she got when her mom was coming to visit—troubled. She and her mom got along better these days, but they had a complicated history that still hurt Cissie. A lot. After graduating high school, she’d moved away from home as soon as she had the money, which didn’t take long; she still pulled decent royalties from her Olympics merch, and she taught archery at rec centers and hunting supply stores to make up the difference.

            That she hadn’t gone to college had both surprised and not surprised Bart. Both of them were, in Cissie’s words, “bummin’ it,” though they both kept pretty busy. Bart heroed more or less full-time. Cissie didn’t. He’d known her longer now out of costume, he reflected, than in.

            And Cissie’s mom was kind to him, when she came over, but it was the kind of measured politeness that let him know that his presence wasn’t needed or desired. Max had once called this a “Southern thing.”

            Cissie had now blinked several times, and Bart reined his thoughts back. What had she asked? No, she hadn’t asked anything. It was just time for him to talk more.

            “In a cabin,” he said. “In Colorado.” Vaguely he wondered how many more times he would have to explain this. Maybe he should just get everyone in one room.

            “What’s he doing there?” she asked. After she first quit Young Justice, she was touchy about discussing superhero things; she always saw it as an attempt to bring her back into the game. But when everyone accepted that she really wasn’t coming back, she eased up.

            “I don’t know,” Bart said. “Nothing, I guess.”

            “Nothing?” Cissie frowned. “Bart, he’s a psycho. Who was created to kill you.”

            “Yeah, but…” Bart looked again at the fake guts, the tubes of sausage all the same size and shape. He’d seen people get hurt bad before. It hadn’t looked like that; not really.

            The words clicked together in his head, the nebulous thing that had been swirling in his thoughts all day. “Then why hasn’t he?”

            “Hm,” Cissie said. “I mean—fair enough, I guess. Have you told the Flash?”

            Bart felt himself making a face, and instantly got rid of it. “Why does everyone keep saying that? He’s not in charge of me.”

            “No, he’s not, but…” She rested her chin on her hand. “Who’s ‘everyone’?”

            “Carol. She came with me, and Thad caught us and made us tea,” Bart said.

            Cissie snorted. “Do you ever think about how weird your life is?”

            “No.”

            She reclined away from him and pressed play on the movie, then clicked the volume down a few times to a low hum. A woman screamed, faintly.

            “What are you gonna do?” Cissie asked.

            Bart considered chewing on some of the half-popped kernels in the bag, but he remembered the leftover chicken and broccoli in the fridge. Living with a speedster, Cissie had once said, was like prepping for the apocalypse; their cabinets overflowed with food.

            He remembered Inertia’s—Thad’s—house. How empty the cabinets were; no fridge, no microwave.

            “What does ‘off the grid’ mean?” he asked.

            Cissie’s face shifted; he tracked back to the last thing she said and realized what a conversational leap he’d made. 

            “It means—independent," she said. "Not using public utilities like electricity.”

            Bart frowned. In junior high, their class had once taken a trip to a living history museum, where men sat around polishing old guns and poking fires and women in long dresses churned butter. He’d tried churning butter, but doing it at normal speed was so boring that he gave up after a few minutes, which, at the time, seemed excruciatingly long.

            He imagined Thad churning butter. The image was so ridiculous he almost laughed.

            “Why would someone want to do that?” he asked.

            “I dunno,” she admitted. “For some people it’s probably about freedom. Not wanting to be tied into society.”

            Bart considered for a moment. “That’s dumb,” he decided.

            “Says the boy who grew up in a video game,” she said.  “I doubt you could go without electricity even if you wanted to.”

            Bart vaulted over the back of the couch and dug the chicken from the back of the fridge. He considered eating it cold, but popped it into the microwave and then ran into his room to change.

            His room was—it wasn’t dirty, or not as dirty as he kept it as a teenager--mostly because Cissie threatened to kick him out when it started to stink and he was never sure whether or not she was joking. There were some clothes on the floor, and a few dirty bowls on the bedside table, but otherwise it was fine. Or good enough, anyway.

            He dug a clean sweatshirt out of the dresser, shucked off his uniform, and tugged on a pair of old gym shorts from high school. There was one spider plant on his desk, which Carol gave him. He poked his finger into the soil—still damp. Under a small window, it had grown pretty big, sending out long stalks with baby plants onto the desk, which he seldom used anyway.

            He wandered back out into the kitchen. A minute thirty left on the microwave.

            In search of something to drink, he opened the fridge. There was a big jug of cold-brew coffee, which was Cissie’s, and a box of wine, which was also Cissie’s. He didn’t know where she got it, since she wasn’t 21. Once, she’d tried to get him to drink with her. She gave him some really sweet wine, which he liked the taste of, but anything he felt from it was gone about a second later. He’d meant to ask the Flash if that was a speedster metabolism thing, but forgot.

            He poured a glass of water from the sink and waited.

            “Are you going to tell anyone else?” Cissie called from the living room. He couldn’t see the TV anymore, but it sounded like a quiet part of the movie.

            “Maybe,” Bart said, but as soon as he did he didn’t like the idea of it. Kon wasn’t always the most trusting person--except of hot girls, anyway--and Tim—as much as he loved Tim, it was hard to imagine that everything in Tim’s life didn’t get back to Batman, and he was sure that this would then get back to the Flash. And he didn’t know how Wally would react to this. He had a history of not trusting Bart’s judgment.

            “Maybe later,” he said. The microwave dinged, and Bart removed the container and dumped the food onto a plate before it could burn his fingers.

            “Just be smart,” Cissie said, and from her tone he knew that she wasn’t being sarcastic.

            He glanced at her bow—one of her bows, the one she used in the Olympics—hanging proudly on the wall.  She rarely used that anymore, but kept it displayed like a trophy, one of the few bits of decoration in their apartment at all.

            “Can I ask you something?” Bart said. The leftover broccoli in the chicken had a weird smell, like pennies.

            “Shoot.”

            “After you quit being Arrowette…did you ever wanna quit archery?”

            Cissie looked at him over the back of the couch. Bart shoveled chicken into his mouth, though some bites were still cold at the center.

            “No,” she said. “Well—maybe for a while, I did. Mostly to spite mom. Being a hero never made me happy…but shooting always did. It seemed stupid to give that up.” She rested her head against the back of the couch. “I mean,” she continued, “you stopped being Impulse for a while. Did you ever want to stop running?”

            “No,” Bart said. “I don’t think I _can_ stop running.”

            Cissie smiled a little. “I don’t think you could, either. Honestly—” She sighed. “I don’t think people _can_ change. Not really. I think they just stop doing things that aren’t really them.”

            Bart considered this for a moment. “Is that a therapy thing?” he asked. Sometimes Cissie shared the things she learned in therapy. Sometimes Bart found them helpful.

            “No,” she said, “that’s a Cissie thing. It’s like—well, my mom. I think at heart she’s a person who wants the very best. For herself, for me, but—” She made a waffling motion with her hand. “It took her a long time to understand that what was best for me wasn’t the same thing as what was best for her. I don’t know if she still totally understands that, but she’s trying. Because she doesn’t like to fail.”

            “Or like Greta,” Bart pointed out. “She did bad things, but she’s still a good person.”

            “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think everyone out there would agree with you, but, yeah.”

            Bart washed his plate in the sink and set it in the drying rack. He hadn’t done too much today, but his head was spinning—more so than usual—and his body sagged with exhaustion.

            “I’m going to bed,” he called out, though the clock read just slightly past 9:30.

            “G’night,” Cissie answered absently. She had returned to her movie, though she watched with a yawn and snuggled deeper into the blankets.

 

            When he got in bed, though, he found himself unable to sleep. In the dark, with streetlights pouring in through the slats of the blinds and making big yellow stripes on the wall, he stared at the ceiling and tried to count sheep. Dox snuggled up next to him in the bed, his breathing quiet and steady, and Bart took to watching the slow rise and fall of his ribs. Watching it, he felt little muscles in his body relaxing—his shoulders, his neck, his knees.

            Cissie taught him something called body scan meditation once, which was a therapy thing, because she sometimes had panic attacks. Bart didn’t, but he’d tried it a few times, for fun. He rarely made it all the way through without getting bored. But he wanted to try it, again, now. He stared at the yellow slats of light and thought—top of his head, ears, eyes—eyebrows, he forgot those—cheeks. Lips. Chin. Back of head, neck, shoulders…

            Thad’s dog, the wood-burning stove, the bare cabinets. No; he was getting distracted. Where was he? Chest—back—arms. Biceps, triceps, brachioradialis…Max had taught him those muscle names. Important to know, he said, to work them equally, stretch them, keep them from getting strained. Wrists, palms, fingers...

            He rolled onto his side and grabbed his phone.

                        B: Do you think people can change?

            Tim had set him up with secure encryption on his texts, which Bart didn’t completely understand, but it kept him from getting yelled at when he wanted to text about superhero stuff.

            It felt like a long time before Carol replied.

                        C: Thinking about Thad?

            She sometimes sent two in a row, so he waited, drumming his fingers on the mattress.

                        C: I don’t know. I think maybe it’s less about change and more about growing up

                       B: ?

            Bart laid a hand on Dox’s side. He opened his eyes briefly, and yawned, and closed them again.

                        C: You’re so different from when we first met, for example

                        B: People say that a lot, but I don’t feel that different

            It took her nearly ten minutes to text back, and Bart had half-drifted off while waiting. When the phone buzzed, he woke and looked at it.

                        C: Sorry—falling asleep. Know you’re freaked out. Lunch tomorrow?

            Bart yawned, mashed the thumbs-up emoji, and rolled to his other side. The mirror that hung on the back of his door looked like a portal in the darkness, a flat hole leading to nothing. He thought about this until he fell asleep, which wasn’t long, but the image stayed behind his eyelids, a black hole, a break in the light, and he half-remembered a story from junior high, a girl climbing through a mirror...

 

            Cissie drifted on a haze of half-sleep until Dox nudged Bart’s bedroom door open with a squeak and jumped up on the couch to nuzzle under her arm.

            She blinked in the startling light of the living room. The last few seconds of the movie’s credits rolled into black, and then with a click and a whirr the VCR rewound the tape. The VCR was about a million years old, but it still worked.

            She scratched Dox behind the ear and stretched. A blanket slid off her lap and onto the floor. Bart snored softly from inside his room.

            What he’d told her, about Thad being back, was a little…disturbing. But disturbing things happened in that life, and it wasn’t really her business; others could handle it. Still, she thought about calling someone—Cassie, maybe, or Anita—but it was late. She’d feel better in the morning.

            She extricated herself from her pile of blankets and stared out the sliding glass door, into the dark. Dox sniffed around her ankles and stared balefully out. She slid open the door and Dox trotted out onto the tiny porch; she followed, glancing over the myriad of tiny potted plants in half-states of dying. Every time her mother came to visit, she brought a plant, because she said the apartment didn’t have enough green and she’d read something about the importance of using plants to purify indoor air. (Cissie had a theory that this was due to some misplaced guilt about exposing her to secondhand smoke; her mother never managed to quit smoking for more than three months, but she always took her cigarettes outside now.)

            Cissie couldn’t bring herself to keep the plants in her room, but she also couldn’t bear to throw them away. So they stayed out here, on the porch, on the periphery, where she often forgot to water them and then felt bad for forgetting.

            The street was visible from the porch, and she watched cars hum by in the quiet night. Dox’s sniffling was loud and funny. He sneezed. She smiled.

            She often felt alone at night. Aside from Bart, all her closest friends lived far away. When they were all younger—so young, it seemed to her, though it hadn’t been that long ago, and that thought carved a hollow in her chest—she and the rest of the girls, Cassie and Anita and Greta and sometimes Traya, if she was around to participate in the fantasy, talked about sharing an apartment together when they were older.

            Now they were older, and they didn’t. Cissie found that she wanted to live in Alabama, because it was familiar to her, and because nothing _happened_ here. She liked that. The others didn’t share her sentiments. So, she talked to them all often but saw them rarely. Such was adulthood, she supposed.

            Dox wandered back into the living room. Cissie picked up her little plastic watering can and, one by one, watered all the little plants. The bromeliad. The hanging fern. The moon cactus, which was really made of two cacti grafted together, a bulging red top sewn onto a green stalk. The red part couldn’t survive on its own, having no chlorophyll; it relied on the green part to sustain it, but the whole assemblage could live only a few years. It was pretty, though. She sprinkled water on it. Then the aloe, the orchid, the mums, the lucky bamboo.


	4. The Handshake

            Thad woke in the dark.

            Most mornings, he rose with the sun; he had no electric lights, and therefore went to sleep not long after sunset. But he had no idea how late, or early, it was now. He’d slept fitfully all night and now stared up through the dark toward the ceiling, listening to the quiet huffing of Ivan’s breath.

            His skin buzzed. He ran his fingertips over the soft, clean sheets, hoping to ground his senses in this, this moment, this house. But the conversation with Bart and Carol played over and over in his head. It was the longest conversation he’d had in—a while. He wanted to preserve every detail, but it was like trying to hold water in his hands. He couldn’t tell whether he accurately remembered their expressions, their outfits; memories, he knew, could be corrupted.

            Carol, with whom he’d faked a friendship for weeks. Bart, the sight of whom had once filled him with the slippery, instinctive rage of an attack dog. Or maybe still did. He didn’t know. The tall trees outside swayed in the wind; he could hear their needles flapping like little flags.

            He shoved the covers aside and groped in the dark room for a sweatshirt. The wooden floor was cool under his feet, and slightly dusty; it always felt dusty, no matter how often he swept. With one hand lightly touching the iron bedposts, the wall, the doorjamb, he felt his way through the house and outside, where the waxing moon shone bright enough to cast shadows.

            Thick walls of forest, untouched by the moonlight, circled his little clearing, his doghouse, his woodpile. He sat down on the porch. No one else around for miles. Only squirrels and deer and the occasional cougar.

            It had surprised him how much older Bart looked. How much leaner, less baby-faced. Thad didn’t keep any mirrors in his house. Bart’s nose—their nose—reminded Thad of their—of President Thawne. He touched his own, wondering. And he wondered about other things—whether Bart’s yellow eyes came from Don or Meloni. To what extent Bart resembled Barry Allen. Whether Bart hated his nose, or his eyes, or anything else that might have come from the Thawne family tree.

            Ivan wandered out the open front door and settled against Thad’s leg. Thad scratched him behind the ear and watched the sky. Stars rolled like waves, horizon to horizon.

            Some of those stars, he figured, were just now producing light that would reach Earth in the 30th century. He wondered if anyone was looking at them then, or if the light pollution of an overpopulated world made it impossible. Would make it impossible.

            He stayed outside, looking up, until the sun rose and lifted a soft-yellow dewy morning around him. When he finally got up, his legs were stiff and his feet numb.

            Before this—before yesterday—he had planned to get food today. Since he didn’t have a source of income, he rotated between different cities, different supermarkets, vibrating in to grab whatever he wanted before the employees arrived for the morning. Mostly this consisted of beans, rice, canned milk; eggs, sometimes, because they would stay good for a few days without refrigeration; meat, which he always cooked the same day; peanut butter, for protein.

            He herded Ivan back inside and shut the door.

            When the Speed Force spit him out, it had been in the middle of the woods very near what was now his cabin. He woke in a nest of pine needles, exhausted and hungry, with no conception of how long he’d been gone and nothing on him but a tattered Inertia costume.

            Something had kept him from running, some instinct or paranoia; either way, he stumbled through the woods without speed until he found an empty RV. Its door was locked, and too tired to force his way in, he drank what felt like gallons from a spigot outside and then crawled underneath. Sheltered from the sun, he slept deeper and longer than he ever had before.

            Now, Thad turned toward Denver and, when he arrived, zipped down a few empty alleys and backstreets until he found a corner store that looked yet-unopened. The inside was dingy, everything covered in a thin film of dust and grease. He vibrated inside and gathered a few cans of green beans and ravioli, close to expiration. Nothing that would be missed.

            He looked around the store. A camera in the corner of the ceiling; he’d be gone so quickly it would register nothing but a blur. Refrigerated cases of beer and bottled water. A shelf of poorly-made plastic toys. A sales counter guarded by thick glass, with a cash register—

            He paused, and his skin itched the way it had all night. He wanted—to talk—to someone—anyone.

            If he had some money…

            Before he could think twice, he replaced the cans, and vibrated through the counter and through the employees-only door behind it, to find the safe. He vibrated his hand in and fished out a wad of bills, then shoved them in the pocket of his sweatpants and then ran out onto the street.

            His heart stuttering in uneasy anticipation as he rounded a street corner into a 24-hour supermarket. The morning sun glared aggressively into his eyes.

            A few times, while posing as Bart, Thad had accompanied Helen on errands. (She’d commented, as if surprised, on how helpful Bart/Thad was with the groceries.) He remembered the way she complained, jokingly, about speedsters eating her out of house and home. He remembered how she asked him to count out exact change from her purse, and the feeling of her hands as he dropped carefully-counted coins into her palm.

            Thad pulled a cart from the corral; the blue plastic of the handle was slippery under his hands. At normal speed he wheeled the cart into the sterile-smelling store, the interior washed out by fluorescent light. He steered into the produce section: pyramids of shiny apples and lemons and papery garlic, freshly arranged, lined up for him to take. A fine mist sprayed over the lettuce and carrots and kale. He took his time selecting what he wanted, sharply aware of the few other shoppers wheeling around the store.

            When he was finished, he unloaded his cart on the conveyer belt. A woman rolled up behind him, a gurgling baby seated in her cart. It stared at him.

            “Find everything alright?” asked the cashier, a bored-looking man. The food beep-beep-beeped across the scanner and dropped into crinkly bags.

            “Yes,” Thad said, stiffly. The cashier said nothing else and kept scanning. One of the lights overhead flickered, just barely. He glanced backward: the woman behind him flashed funny faces at the baby, who laughed and banged its chubby hands on the cart.

            “$19.04,” the cashier said. Thad handed over a 20 and fiddled with the rest of the cash in his pocket, which he hadn’t counted. The cash register went click-ding, and the cashier held out a palmful of coins for Thad to take. Their hands brushed in the exchange. Thad bit the inside of his cheek.

            “Have a good one,” the cashier said.

            “You too,” Thad choked. The woman was already loading her apples on the conveyer belt.

            He rolled his cart outside, gathered his bags, and took off for home, change rattling loudly in his pocket the whole way.

 

            Bart woke late that morning, clammy from a bad dream he couldn’t remember.

            White light spilled over the room, the cream-colored carpet and off-white walls. He rolled over and looked at his alarm clock. 1:00. Beyond the bedroom, Dox paced around the kitchen, his claws tap-tapping on the linoleum floor.

            Groggy from oversleep, Bart laid in bed and let the lingering unease from his dream seep away. Dreams were like VR, he thought; they looked real, and felt real, and stretched time out in every direction. But you remembered VR, even if the memory was hazy. Dreams evaporated if you didn’t hold onto them. So maybe less real. Or less permanent.

            Cissie told him once that dreams were the brain’s method of processing information. Bart wondered if neurons fired faster in speedsters’ brains. When he asked Wally about things like that, Wally always replied with something vague about the Speed Force. Bart suspected this was because Wally didn’t really know that much about the Speed Force. Max would know the answer, he bet.

            He got up and stumbled into the kitchen. Lunch—he was meeting Carol for lunch. He checked his phone; she’d texted him several times already, wondering where he was.

            “Grife.”

           

            Carol waited in the café she’d chosen, nursing a cup of tea. The place had good food, but the outdated décor—dusty fabric flowers on every table, faux-wood paneling, fake bottles of wine—made it unpopular with students, which meant it wasn’t often busy, which meant that Bart could talk more or less uninterrupted and without much risk of eavesdropping.

            A breeze and a blur outside. She took a few sips and counted seconds in her head—she got to eight—before a disheveled Bart walked through the door and plopped down at her table.

            “What took you so long, speedy?” she asked. He looked about as tired as Carol felt.

            “I overslept,” he said. “You look tired.”

            “I didn’t sleep well,” she said. “It’s—well, knowing there’s someone out there who could find you in the blink of an eye is…unsettling.”

            Bart’s frowned. Carol fiddled with the tag of her teabag. It was slightly damp; she’d dropped it in the water on accident and had to fish it out with her fork.

            “Especially someone raised by President Thawne,” she continued, hushing her voice to as low as Bart would still be able to hear. “I still think about the future a lot. What he did—or didn’t do, I guess.”

            The server—an older, sleepy-looking woman—approached then with their plates. The conversation lapsed into silence as she put a stack of pancakes in front of Bart and a chicken salad wrap in front of Carol. Both of them watched the server walk away until she was too far again to hear them.

            “Max always said to think through the options,” Bart said. He took the bottle of maple syrup from the table and poured it over his pancakes, surprisingly slowly, making tight and controlled circles. “Option one is to tell Wally, which I don’t want to do.”

            Carol wondered if Wally had any idea that she knew the Flash’s name. Bart had long since abandoned any attempt to keep any secrets around her, which both frustrated and relieved her—it was a deep, scary, sweet kind of intimacy.

            “Option two?” she prompted.

            He capped the syrup and put it back down. “Leave him alone, I guess. But that seems wrong.”

            “Wrong because you feel bad for him?” Carol asked. “Or wrong because you’re afraid?”

            “Both,” Bart said. He shoved a too-big bite of pancake into his mouth and then didn’t elaborate.

            “I’m guessing option three,” Carol said, “is to keep talking to him.”

            Bart nodded.

            She swirled a fry in some ketchup, until the tip was soggy and unpleasant.

            “You asked me if I thought people could change.” She popped the fry in her mouth and considered what she wanted to say, and Bart watched her, waiting.

            “When I first met you, Bart, you were really different. I mean, before you learned how to live here in the past—before you started getting along with Max, and before you had Helen there, too—you didn’t really seem to care about anything.” Bart opened his mouth to respond. “Which I get,” she quickly continued. “I do. You were raised in VR. You didn’t know any better. But now…”

            “You think Thad is the same way?”

            “Honestly?” she said. “I don’t know. You were raised in VR, but Thad was actively programmed to…hate you. To be angry and destructive. But—he _is_ still you, basically, on a genetic level, at least. So maybe it’s like, you know, he’s been damaged. And I don’t know what it takes to fix damage like that.”

            Bart looked unhappy, but instead of replying, he took another big bite of pancake.

            She tried to imagine if Bart had been raised that way. If he’d been sent back to Manchester as an agent of destruction, rather than smuggled out as a refugee of President Thawne’s oppression. Or if Thad had been the original, and Bart the clone—would her life, now, be any different?

            It was hard to imagine, but it also wasn’t.

            “I think he needs help,” Bart said. “I think he’s scared.”

             “Scared of what?”

            “I dunno. But why else would he be hiding out in a cabin in the woods like that?”

            Carol hummed. “He did try to kill Max. And you. Maybe he’s scared of the consequences?”

            “Yeah, maybe. But…” Bart trailed off. A little stream of syrup was about to overflow from his plate; she reached across the table and swiped it up with her finger.

            “I don’t think that’s it,” Bart continued. “Dr. Morlo used to be bad, but he helped out when Max was dying, and Max didn’t _hate_ him or anything. White Lightning always stole stuff, but—”

            “There’s a difference between stealing things and what he tried to do to you,” Carol said, as gently as she could manage. “I just think you can be a little bit too forgiving sometimes, Bart. Attempted murder is still a crime.”

            “It’s not really his fault, though,” Bart argued. “Thawne brainwashed him. He was like a…a tool.” He took a bite, slightly faster than regular speed—not fast enough that anyone else would notice, but Carol knew he was getting agitated.

            “Like, future-you developed that tech,” he continued, “and Thawne wanted to use it to kill people. Would that make it your fault?”

            “Yes,” Carol replied, without hesitation.

            Bart frowned. “I think you’re wrong,” he said. “I think Thawne is an evil guy and he would have found some way to hurt people whether you were there or not. It just…happened to be you.” He sawed his knife through his last couple bites of pancake. “Thawne is just…a bad guy.”

            “You’re part Thawne,” Carol pointed out.

            Bart shrugged. “And Thad is half Allen. And my mom is a Thawne, and she’s a great person.” He swirled his last bit of pancake around in the syrup pooled on the plate, leaving little soggy crumbs stuck in the syrup. “I think that stuff doesn’t really matter as much as everyone else thinks it does. President Thawne doesn’t do bad things because he’s a Thawne. He does bad things because he’s bad.”

            Carol reached over and dipped a piece of chicken in his leftover syrup. He pushed his plate toward her. “Your sleeve,” he said. She looked down; her sleeve was nearly falling in the syrup. She rolled it up.

            “And Thad does bad things because…?” she asked.

            “Because he thought he was supposed to.”

            Carol popped the chicken into her mouth. She’d never had much of a sweet tooth before Bart, but then Bobby had never allowed a lot of sweets in the house. She’d teased him about that once, recently, and he’d told her that he was concerned about affording dental work for her and her sister. She hadn’t brought it up again.

            She swallowed. “You think intentions speak louder than actions,” Carol concluded. That tracked with what she knew about Bart—he often seemed to see things in terms of inherent goodness and badness. When they were younger, she’d chalked this up to his being raised in what was essentially a video game; his references to “good guys” and “bad guys” felt to her like a product of that world. But he’d seen and done so many things, and grown so much, that it felt deeper than that. This was a worldview he’d thought about and decided was correct and accurate.

            Carol couldn’t say she shared it. But she respected it.

            “Yeah,” he said. “Trying to do the right thing is important. You can’t control whether it turns out right or not, but you can try.”

            Carol rested her chin on her hands, elbows propped on the table. “You’re a pretty sweet guy. You know that?” she asked.

            Bart gave her a strange look. “Carol, you tell me that all the time.”

            She rolled her eyes. The server dropped the check on the table and slipped away without a word. Carol pulled some cash from her wallet and placed it on the check, then slid the check to the end of the table.

            “So you’re going to check on him again?” she asked. The front door chimed; a couple walked in holding hands.

            “Yeah,” Bart said. “I don’t think it’s healthy to be alone like that. And I want to know what he’s so afraid of.”

            The server retrieved the check and, a few moments later, returned with change. Carol counted out the exact tip.

            “Well,” she said, “keep me updated.” She thought for a moment. “We should come up with something—just in case he, you know, switches places again.”

            “Like a secret code?” Bart asked with a grin. “Or a secret handshake.”

            “Secret handshake, why not,” Carol decided.

            They left the restaurant and walked—normal speed—back to Carol’s dorm, playing with different—and increasingly silly—versions of a secret handshake. At some point, they ended up with their hands clasped together, and just never untangled them, but walked hand-in-hand, still chatting.

            It didn’t really phase her one way or the other, though she was conscious of the touch. Over the last couple of years they’d drifted apart and back together multiple times, and she understood why: because saving the world was a full-time commitment; because he’d moved away from Manchester; because she sometimes—briefly—dated people, or had other groups of friends, which was fun, for a little bit, but eventually she always came to see how boring everyone else was compared to Bart Allen. It was a wonder, she sometimes thought, that he didn’t find her boring. But in some version of their lives they’d been so in love that they’d moved to the future together, and seeing this as a teenager had both thrilled and terrified her. And she’d never had time to interrogate whatever it was that had wedged itself between those older versions of themselves, because so much else had been going on, or because—more honestly—she didn’t want to know.

            She squeezed his hand in hers. Everything that had happened to her—nobody knew, or would ever know, except Bart and his family. She needed him—and all of them—in that way.

            Which was a more than a little frightening.

            “I think you’re right,” she said, as they approached her dorm. Someone from Carol’s floor gave a half-wave, and Carol smiled back.

            “About what?”

            “I think Thad _is_ lonely.” They stopped in front of the door. “But that kind of isolation—I bet it’s comfortable for him. It’s what he’s used to. So he might resist accepting help.”

            Bart nodded, wide-eyed, trusting.

            “Keep me updated,” she said again. “Really.”

            “Okay,” he said. “See you later.”

            Carol went up to her bedroom and, drowsy from the heat and the meal and everything else, kicked off her shoes and climbed between the sheets of her bed. She set an alarm—she had another class, in the evening—and drifted off, realizing just before she fell asleep that they’d never actually agreed on a real secret handshake.

 

            Bart wove a line down the states, through Mexico and Central America and into Brazil. Just some aimless running, to loosen up and get focused. He took a sharp turn east across the ocean, down around the west coast of Africa, and as he banked around the Cape of Good Hope he noticed two tall lines of seafoam speeding toward him like train tracks.

            For a brief moment, he considered speeding up—but that would just be making problems for himself later. He slowed his pace, and Wally ran up alongside him.

            “You don’t have to slow down, y’know,” Wally complained.

            “Hey, cuz,” Bart said, and gave a mock salute. “You gonna yell at me again?”

            Wally frowned. “Is that all you think I do?”

            Bart rolled his eyes. They ran over the crest of a tall wave, past an oil rig. He wondered if there were people on it.

            “Okay, well, believe it or not, I’m not here to argue,” Wally said. “I just wanted to ask if you’ve been to Denver lately.”

            Bart missed a step; his shoe splashed ocean water up over his legs.

            “Uhh,” he said. “No. Why?”

            Wally sighed. “Some local news station out there is all up in arms about a speedster stealing cash from a convenience store. I mean, there’s no proof of it being a speedster, but they found money missing from the safe and when they checked the security footage there was a blur, and…”

            Bart watched the horizon for a moment. There was rain ahead; the sky and the ocean melted into dark gray. He banked to one side as the gears clicked into place in his head.

            “You thought I stole from a convenience store?”

            “I was hoping you had, actually. It wouldn’t be the dumbest thing you’d ever done, and—if it is a speedster, we need to know who.”

            They rounded a sandbar, approaching the coast, though Bart had lost track of _which_ coast exactly. Nurse sharks browsed lazily under their feet.

            “Did you ask anyone else?” Bart said. They crossed onto the sand, and then onto grass; running was easier on solid ground, each step sending little shocks of pressure up the bones of the legs.

            “You were my first hunch,” Wally admitted, “but I’ll go check on Jesse, too.”

            “And Irey and Jai,” Bart prompted.

            Wally frowned. “Bart, I think I would know—no, you know what, never mind. You’re right. No one gets a free pass.”

            Side-by-side they tore into a city, weaving between crowds and cars. The air was hot and tacky and Bart tried to recognize the language he saw on the street signs they passed, but he was too distracted by the conversation.

            “Hey—listen,” Wally said. He grabbed Bart by the shoulder and together they slowed to a stop in a wide field of soybeans whose leaves all fluttered in the light breeze.

            “How are you doing?” Wally asked. “Really.” There was a sincerity in his face that made Bart suspicious.

            “I’m not stealing money, if that’s what you mean.” He shrugged Wally’s hand away.

            “No, I’m not—” Wally pinched the bridge of his nose. “Come on. For real. How’s everything going?”

            Bart looked him in the eyes for a long time. But he couldn’t find the angle.

            “It’s…fine?” he finally said. “Same as always.”

            “Okay. Good.” Wally nodded for too long. A hairy caterpillar had crawled onto Bart’s shoe and was inching its way across.

            “Have you…given any thought to a day job?”

            “No,” Bart replied, instantly and honestly. He knew it wasn’t the answer Wally wanted to hear, which was maybe why he said it so fast. But it was true.

            “I don’t know,” he continued. “I don’t really see the point. Why can’t I just hero all the time?”

            “Because it’s…well, it’s exhausting, Bart.” Wally put his hands on his hips and looked off across the field. “I know you do a good job and you’ve come a long way, but you need some normalcy in your life.”

            Bart snorted. “What’s normal? I was born in the 30th century and I have _superspeed_.”

            “Fair point.” Wally looked back at Bart. “Look—I’m not trying to get on your case. Why don’t you come for dinner on Sunday?  Linda wants to use the grill one more time before summer’s over. Jay and Joan will be there, and you can bring a friend.”

            The caterpillar left Bart’s shoe on the other side, blindly groping its way forward.

            “Alright,” he said. A family dinner wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for your encouraging and kind words! This is an idea that's been in my head forever, and I'm so happy that others are enjoying it as well.


	5. The Cookout

            Thad stood in the Wests’ backyard with a plate of potato chips in his hand.

            That morning, Bart had come to his cabin bearing a bag of jumbo marshmallows. When Thad cracked open the front door and asked what they were for, Bart explained that he could roast them over the wood stove; when further pressed, he explained that Helen had taught him never to visit someone’s house without bringing food.

            Thad let him in—he had a question to ask.

            “So…” He leaned as casually as he could manage against the wall, still clutching the bag of marshmallows in his fist. “Where’s Max?”

            Bart, halfway through arranging himself into a comfortable position on the couch, froze. Thad kept his face carefully neutral, though something in the region of his stomach threatened to plummet.

            “He’s…” Bart said, quietly. He clasped his hands between his knees. Ivan wandered over to sniff his shoe. “He’s in the Speed Force,” Bart said. “He has been for a while. I don’t know if he’s coming back.”

            The Speed Force. The corner of Thad’s mouth twitched; he bit his cheek and locked it down.

            “Oh,” he said. “That’s unfortunate.”

            Bart looked up, his wide eyes hurt. Thad fixed his gaze on the top of his head.

            “And, you know,” Bart said, “I bet if he’d known you were out here before he…left—”

            “Stop,” Thad said. His throat was tight. He cleared it. “Fine.”

            Max in the Speed Force. It was…a possibility he’d expected. But it certainly wasn’t what he’d hoped for.

            Ironic.

            Unsure of what else to say, Thad began opening the windows. The room felt—stuffy. Each little window swung open and cool, damp air swept in on a tide of morning birdsong. There were jays in the yard; their grating squawks drowned out everything else.

            Bart jumped up as he turned around.

            “Wally is having a cookout Sunday. You should come.”

            Thad blinked, started by his sudden change in demeanor. He looked excited; he was smiling, anyway. Weren’t they just talking about…?

            “What?” Thad said. “No. What?”

            “It’s a good idea!” Bart tucked his hands close to his chest—a defensive gesture.  It wasn’t a good idea. “Come on. You can’t hide here forever, and Wally’s gonna figure it out eventually. I mean, he’s dumb, but he’s been more hooked into the Speed Force lately and he’s gonna realize that one more person is tapping in than he thinks there is. Then he’ll probably assume you’re up to something, because he always does that. By the way, did you steal money in Denver?”

            “I—”

            “It’s fine—I mean it’s not fine, cause you shouldn’t steal, but it’s not a big deal. If you come to the cookout, everyone will see you’re not doing anything evil. Evil people don’t go to cookouts.” Bart paused for a moment. “I’m pretty sure,” he amended.

            Thad stared, his lips parted halfway between a _no_ and silence. Ridiculous as the idea was—there was an itch, a craving at the back of his skull, for human contact, for _normalcy_ , for—family, even. Not his family, of course, but someone’s.

           

            He hung to the edge of the yard, by the house. With stiff hands he held his plate and his chips that he hadn’t taken even a single bite of bite of yet.

            Bart had told them he was coming; he’d explained everything, he said, and made them promise to leave him alone—very alone, as it turned out.

            He watched: Wally stood at the grill, flipping burger patties and talking with Linda. Thad could hear them, just barely; they argued about the names of different clouds, occasionally pointing up at the sky. Wally was making up joke names, which Linda pretended not to find funny. Jay and Joan drank beer at the picnic table in the middle of the yard and watched Bart play cornhole with Irey and Jai.

            None of them wanted him here.

            Wally kept giving him sideways glances; Linda had to touch his arm to get him to look away. Jay and Joan’s conversations quieted when Thad was near. And he didn’t blame them. He knew how much suffering the Thawnes had pressed on this little family. The memory of Barry Allen lingered like an icon, a saint; Eobard Thawne hovered like the shadow of death, something ugly and inevitable that none of them wanted to discuss.

            He didn’t really want to be here either—but he did, too, even if it was immediately apparent that it was too much too soon. The shadow of a cloud passed over the yard, and faded again.

            Wally and Linda had stopped talking. Linda turned and began walking toward Thad and Wally watched with poorly-hidden apprehension, and Thad wished he didn’t notice when she crossed the halfway point between Wally and himself—the point after which he could get to her faster than Wally could stop him.

            “Can I get you something to drink, Thad?” she asked.

            Wally still watched. Thad knew why, but it pissed him off anyway.

            “No, thank you,” he said, knowing as he said it that it sounded more than a little sarcastic.

            From the nearby cooler, she grabbed a beer for herself and cracked it open. Thad realized that he _was_ a little thirsty, but he didn’t say anything.

            She leaned up against the wall beside him. Together they surveyed the family: Jay and Joan, Wally, Bart, the twins. So many of the world’s speedsters gathered in the space of a quarter-acre. So much power. So concentrated. Any one of them, if they wanted to, could cause tidal waves, earthquakes, could rewrite history…

            And yet they didn’t.

            “So,” Linda said, still looking out at her children. “You know everything that’s going to happen to us, huh?”

            Thad looked at her; she took a sip of her beer, the sides of which ran dewy with condensation. She looked comfortable. If she had an angle, he wasn’t sure what it was.

            “Iris West-Allen has been to this time period. You met her. Surely you read her book.”

            She shook her head. “Nope. I’d rather it be a surprise.”

            Across the yard, Wally took a pair of burgers to Jay and Joan. He glanced again at Linda and Thad.

            “I only know the general…scope…of things,” Thad said. “I extensively studied Bart’s life up until the point at which I was due to arrive. Nothing after.”

            Linda nodded. “The future would have changed anyway, right? If you’d succeeded?”

            The cavalier tone of her voice shocked him. If he’d succeeded—what would have changed? Enough to destabilize the time loop—to prevent his being made in the first place? But no—Thawne had to have worked it out; otherwise he would have just killed Bart as an infant.

            “Never thought about it, huh?” Linda guessed.

            “I…” Thad looked at his chips. A fly had landed on the edge of the plate. “That information was never given to me.”

            “So you don’t know what the future holds,” she said. “Join the party.”

            Wally breezed over—looking right at Thad the whole time—and pressed a comically-loud kiss to Linda’s cheek. He snatched a swig of her beer before she could blink.

            “Hey,” she said, swatting him on the shoulder. He winked.

            The interaction made Thad uncomfortable.

            Wally turned to him.

            “Thad,” he said, carefully, over-politely. As if he were speaking to a child. “Do you want a hot dog or a hamburger?”

            When Thad posed as Bart, he’d gotten well-acquainted with 20th century food. He’d even come to crave some of it, over time.

            “Hot dog.”

            Wally snatched Thad’s plate and ran to the grill and back. He returned with three hot dogs in buns.

            “Condiments are by the grill,” he said, slinging an arm around his wife’s shoulders.

            Thad swept a wide arc around Bart and the twins, who had abandoned their game to wrestle on the ground. After adding relish and mustard, he sat down at the picnic table—at the opposite end of Joan and Jay—at which point Bart emerged from the pile of skinny limbs and yelped, “Food’s ready?”

            An instant later Bart sat right next to him, his pile of hot dogs all dressed with mustard and relish.

            “Hey, same toppings,” he said. “Cool.”

            Thad didn’t reply. He took a bite, though suddenly he felt a little sick; swallowing felt like a lump of wet paper down his throat. The conversation with Linda stuck in his mind.

            “You’ve been to the future,” he said to Bart, whose cheeks distended with food.

            “Mhm.” Bart swallowed. “Couple times, yeah. My mom took me once, and then I went to get Carol when she kidnapped herself…” He ticked those instances off on his fingers.

            Thad frowned. “Bucklen’s been to the future?”

            “Yeah, well, me ‘n’ her lived there as grown-ups—like grandpa Barry and grandma Iris did—but old Carol made some kinda tech that President Thawne wanted to use, so old Carol had to kidnap Carol and then I—”

            Thad threw up a hand.

            “Just…hold on. Shut up,” he said. Bart took another bite and Thad rifled through everything Bart had just said.

            “Thawne was _still_ president? Even when you were an adult?”

            Bart nodded, chewing. “Yep. Sucks, doesn’t it?”

            Thad wanted to hit something. Everyone sitting at the table, Jay and Joan and even the kids, and Wally making his way over—they seemed suddenly to loom over him. He pressed his fists against his thighs and switched to another question.

            “How did you _get_ to the future?”

            “I just used my speed scouts to—”

            “Your what?”

            “Speed scouts. Y’know.”

            Thad stared. “I—no, I don’t, moron; what are you talking about?”

            Bart sighed. “Here. I’ll show you.”

            His edges blurred for a fraction of a second, and then a golden duplicate of Bart popped into existence beside him. It looked neither entirely solid nor entirely like a hologram; it shimmered in the light, catching the sun on its edges, but also seemed to possess a luminescence of its own. It reminded Thad of things he’d seen in the Speed Force storm—humanoid figures passing in and out of his vision like ghosts, watching him, judging him.

            It was hard to look at.

            “Get me a Coke,” Bart said to the duplicate.

            It snapped off a salute. “You got it, boss.”

            A moment later, Bart had his Coke, and the duplicate—the scout, Bart had called it—disappeared, little wisps of light or energy or speed streaming back into Bart’s body fast as little filaments of lightning.

            Thad looked around the table. The others chatted, unfazed by this—whatever it was. Even Wally had stopped his suspicious glances.

            “How did you do that?”

            “I dunno. It’s just like…” Bart spread his hands wide. “Poof. Max thought they might be discharges of Speed Force, like the lightning that comes off us when we run, but more directed. That’s why they can travel through time.”

            Thad shook his head. “You can send them anywhere? Past or future?” The possibilities were endless—time travel without a treadmill, or a transport, or any tech at all.

            Bart took a monstrous bite of his hot dog. “Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t do it very much.”

            “Why not?”

            He shrugged, frowning a little, defensive. “I just don’t. It’s for emergencies.”

            “But…” Thad gestured at the empty air. “You just used it to get you a soda.”

            “Yeah, well…” Bart trailed off, vaguely looking to the distance.

            Wally sat down next to his cousin; Thad leaned away a little, hunching over his plate. “Max gave you enough sense not to mess around with the timestream anyway, right?”

            It was obvious to Thad that Wally was teasing—he nudged Bart with his elbow—but Bart frowned a little, like he took the comment seriously. There was so much that set Bart apart from the rest of this family already, and this—as far as Thad knew, no other speedster could make those scouts. Not Wally. Not Barry. Not even Max.

            Did Bart realize any of that? Surely he must. Naïve as he was, he couldn’t be that oblivious.

            Thad kept eating; the food was warm and greasy and satisfying. If the scouts could go anywhere, he thought—and if they were tangible—well, they were at least tangible enough to hold a soda. He wondered how much of Bart’s consciousness traveled with them. Could they make decisions for themselves, or did they only do as they were told?

            The conversation around the table continued; bags of chips and sodas were passed around. Waves of invisible, shimmering heat radiated from the closed hood of the grill. Thad, having nothing else to say, was quiet, and noticed that Bart was also quiet, staring down at his plate as he chewed.

            “So, Thad,” Jay said. The tension returned to Thad’s shoulders like a snapping rubberband.

            “Bart tells us you built your own house,” Jay continued. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

            Thad hesitated. Were they trying to—get something out of him? But as he looked around the table, their open faces were nothing but interested and polite. In the case of the adults, he could tell it was a forced politeness; their backs were stiff and their hands folded mechanically in front of them, but even so…

            “I…went to the library,” he ventured. “In Denver. They had books about homesteading and construction.”

            Wally raised his eyebrows. Jay nodded.

            “Where did you find the lumber?”

            “I…” Thad was reticent, but if this was a trap, it was an absurdly banal one. “I found a few old cabins that had been abandoned, or condemned. I could salvage the lumber that wasn’t rotted by…vibrating it out of the joints…” He trailed off awkwardly. In truth, it had been a long and difficult and frustrating process, and at the time he had been terrified and angry and confronting the yawning abyss of his impending isolation, which at the time he assumed would be permanent.

            But it sounded so easy when he described it. He wasn’t sure whether he liked that.

            Jay and Joan asked him a few more questions, and he was neither uncomfortable nor comfortable with answering; it was just bizarre. Some deep part of him was still revolted by these people, but another part—deeper or shallower, he couldn’t tell—bathed in the comfort of their company.

            And his mind drifted back to the shimmering effigy Bart made of himself. Another way he and Bart were set apart; another way Bart was better. But that was the Thawne in him thinking. He refocused on the conversation; Jay was asking him how he liked using a wood stove. He replied that he found stoking it meditative.

            “But it’s so primitive,” Bart interjected.

            Jay laughed. “Max must have grown up with a wood stove, right?”

            “The way Max told it, he grew up eating dinosaur steaks and dodging the plague,” Bart groused. He scooped the crumbling mess that remained off the pecan pie onto his plate.

            “I think they’re cozy,” Joan said. She smiled politely at Thad.

            “There _are_ plenty of places where people still use wood stoves,” Linda added.

            Bart narrowed his eyes—trying to decide if they were teasing him, Thad thought. “There are?”

            “You’ve never noticed? Bart, we can go anywhere in the world,” Jay said.

            Linda jabbed Wally with her fork, playfully. “Anywhere except Gotham.”

            “Yeah, well,” Wally said, “Gotham’s more about the tire fires than the wood stoves.”

            “Wally,” Joan chided him.

            Thad watched the conversation volley back and forth in front of him, feeling fascinated and more than a little bit shut out. But he watched them all, stitching together a web of relationships in his mind, a deeper understanding of how these people behaved.

            At some point, Linda brought out dessert. She laid out a few different storebought pies and doled out a large slice of apple for Thad, and he wondered why he had been so suspicious of her. Why he had been so suspicious of this. Everything was…fine. Peaceful, almost, through the haze of unease. He took a bite of the pie. It was gluey and overly sweet.

            Bart leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “They’re always like this.”

            Thad wondered if that was true, and felt a brief tremor of hope that he would get to find out for himself.

 

            Around sunset Thad hit a wave of exhaustion—the afternoon had been a lot to process, and now every little sound, every interaction, crumpled in his mind like tin foil. He wanted to go home.

            He was unsure how to excuse himself.

            If he were still—Bart—it would have been easy. He knew how Bart acted. He did not know how Thad acted when leaving a party, and the indecision paralyzed him so long that he ended up staying past the orange-purple sunset, another hour past dusk, when fireflies began winking over the yard. Finally he approached Wally and thrust his hand out.

            Wally regarded it for a brief second, then took his handshake. In the moment that they touched, all of Thad’s bravado deflated in the face of the knowledge that he was shaking hands with the Flash. He was—intimidated. Ridiculous, he thought, pulling his hand away so quickly that it almost felt like a yank. Wally either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

            “Thank you for having me,” Thad forced out. “I’m going home now.”

            Wally’s face gentled. “Thanks for coming. And for eating the apple pie. Nobody ever wants that one.”

            Thad didn’t know what to make of that joke, though he sensed it was in good humor, so he turned to leave—and as soon as his foot lifted, ready to run, Wally called another:

            “And don’t steal any more money!”

            Thad pressed his foot back to the earth. He turned around.

            “What?”

            Beyond and behind Wally, Bart’s face had become apprehensive, giant eyebrows arching together like tree branches. The atmosphere of the room had flipped; everyone was staring at either him or Wally, whose face was entirely loathsome in its levity. 

            “It was you, right?” Wally asked, his voice still high with joking. “Just don’t do it again.” He raised his beer high in a gesture of mock gravitas.

            An ugly shock ran from Thad’s scalp to his toes. He forced himself to smile. “It’s not like I have any choice, do I?”

            Wally’s beer lowered by inches; the sour feel of the room finally seemed to crack into him. “Uh…”

            “It’s not as if I have a source of income, right? It’s not as if I have a social security number or a driver’s license or a birth certificate, _right_?”

            Bart shook his head frantically at Thad.

            “Oh, uh…” Wally faded into awkwardness. “We can get you those things. It’s—it’s not a big deal.”

            “Isn’t it?” Thad pronounced each consonant carefully, spitting them out like pebbles. _Pull back._ He adjusted his tone—cooler, more neutral. He drifted closer to Wally and stared up from under his chin. “Then why did you just _assume_ it was me?”

            Wally rolled his eyes. “Come on, man. I’m not stupid; obviously it was you.”

            And all Thad could think then was: _What can I say that will hurt him the most?_

            “You must be stupid to let someone like me hang around your kids,” Thad hissed in Wally’s face.

            Before anyone could speak, Wally popped him in the nose.

            Thad stumbled back. It felt like his mind slamming back into his body, like he already knew he’d done something monumentally stupid on instinct. Warm blood already welled and oozed down out of his nostrils and over his lips.

            He ran.

            Bart looked at Wally, shocked. Wally’s breathing slowed; he blinked, and groaned, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

            “Damn it.”

            Bart tore after Thad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't LOVE this chapter but it's been about a month and I wanted to get something up. How are y'all doing? I'd love to talk to you!


	6. The Brothers

            “Your powers,” Max had explained, “are not only yours.”

            This was the third or fourth time that Bart, seeing crackles and pops of light flash out from under the crack of a closed door, had phased through the wall to find his mentor in sharp and terrifying meditation. He always tried to be sneaky; he was always silent, but Max always caught him. He was never angry, but it frustrated Bart still to be so—transparent.

            “How do you always know I’m here?”

            “If you’d just _opened_ the door—normal speed—I might not have,” Max said, laying his hands on his knees like two big maple leaves falling from a tree. “I was tapped into the Speed Force. You were using your speed.”

            The crackles of light faded, leaving the room gray and strange. Bart sat on the carpet.

            “Here,” Max said. “Hold out your hand.”

            Bart did. Max pushed his sleeve up to the elbow and pointed at a faint blue vein.

            “Where does your blood come from?”

            Bart blinked. Where does it _come from_?

            After a moment of silence, Max continued. “The heart. It comes from the heart, Bart.”

            “No it doesn’t,” Bart said. He couldn’t remember where blood was made—he swore he’d heard the right answer once—but he knew it wasn’t in the heart.

            “It’s a metaphor. Stay with me.” Max traced the vein down Bart’s wrist, to the tip of his middle finger. “The blood comes from the heart,” he said, pointing at each finger in turn, “and goes to all these different places, but they’re not separated. It’s a closed circuit.”

            Bart shifted his hand in the bare light, looking at all the tiny lines of blue veiled underneath the skin. He saw, or imagined, a little pulse. He thought about the metaphor.

            “The Speed Force is the heart,” he said.

            “The Speed Force is the heart,” Max agreed.

 

            “Bart, wait up.”

            Bart heard Wally calling out behind him—but more than that, he could feel him, a thin and flickering string of invisible energy tethering them together, just like he could feel Thad somewhere ahead, already far away.

            He sped up, though he didn’t push it, didn’t break the sound barrier—they were in a residential area, surrounded by street-parked cars and families strolling down bright sidewalks.

            Wally took a shortcut between two widely-spaced houses and came up just beside him.

            “Listen to me,” he said, shouting over the wind. “I shouldn’t have done that. But something’s not right with that kid!”

            “So what,” Bart shouted back. “You thought I was weird, too, right? Weird and stupid and dangerous? Isn’t that why you dumped me on Max?”

            “You _were_ dangerous!” Wally’s fingers grazed the back of Bart’s arm, and he pressed forward, faster. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you, Bart, and I’m sorry that it hurt your feelings, but you were dangerous, and it sucks that you still don’t understand that.”

            Turning sharply back, Bart thrust his leg out in front of Wally; Wally jumped over, snatched Bart by the arm, and, squirming and elbowing, pressed him into a headlock. Together they skidded to a stop.

            “Let me go,” Bart choked out.

            “Only if you promise not to run off where I can’t talk to you.”

            Bart stopped squirming.

            “You’re right,” Wally said. “I shouldn’t have hit him. I got angry. Okay? But you know I had cause to be angry, right?”

            Bart went limp, petulantly, in Wally’s grip. “Fine,” he said.

            “Okay." Wally released him.

            They’d ended up somewhere in the middle of a forest. A fine mist of rain collected on Bart’s hair.

            “He stopped running, I think,” Wally said, hands on his hips. “Which way was he going? Northeast?”

            “I don’t know.”

            The drizzle was so faint it was barely audible, gently pattering against all the leaves. Wally and Bart sized each other up, and only then did it occur to Bart that Wally had suited up. He did that _fast_.

            “I know you believe he can be better,” Wally said. “Heck—I want to believe he can better, too. It’d make all our lives a lot easier. But the fact is, we just don’t know yet.” He sighed. Little drips of water fell from the tips of his lightning bolts. “The boy’s one huge variable, and that chip on his shoulder isn’t helping.”

            Shifting his feet on the ground, Bart thought of Cissie. When she freaked out and quit, they’d all pressed her and bothered her, and it had been the wrong thing to do. She’d needed space. It took them all a long time to understand that.

            But Greta—Greta had been sad and angry, maybe for a long time, and they’d all ignored it because it made them uncomfortable, and that had been the wrong thing to do, too. She drifted away and did bad things. She’d needed someone to chase after her.

            With a static pop, Bart conjured a scout. Rain fizzled weirdly on its edges.

            “Go back and follow Thad until he stops running,” Bart said. “Tell me where he went.”

            “From a distance,” Wally hurriedly amended. “Don’t do anything.”

            The scout zapped off, and a moment later returned, barreling straight back into Bart’s body. It was always disorienting, dizzying, to gain the new memories. He saw…

            “He went to Gotham,” Bart reported. Wally’s face scrunched up.

            “What’s he doing _there_?”

 

            _Idiot._

            He’d forgotten his shoes. He was going to grab them on his way out, but he forgot, and now his bare feet slammed against pavement, forest floor, water, cycling through, and only the protective cushion of the Speed Force kept them from being shredded apart.

            He could feel them following him. The only thing he could think to do was turn toward Gotham, because Wally didn’t want to go there.

            Passing city limits, the skyline highlighted by the eerie orange glow of light pollution, he swerved into a gas station bathroom. As he stood there, catching his breath against the cool sink, he realized they weren’t following him anymore. They’d stopped. They really were leaving him alone.

            The bathroom was filthy, lit by a single bare lightbulb. Liquid—he couldn’t tell what in the dim light—puddled on the floor around the toilet. He turned around to face the mirror, clawing his fingers into the edge of the sink as if the porcelain could ground him.

            He wasn’t still bleeding, of course. But the wind had streamed the blood from his nose across his face, to his ears, and dried it there in dark flakes. Part of him—a strange part twisting deep in his gut—liked the way it looked. He smiled. But that made him feel twisted, so he stopped. He washed his face with the dingy, sulfur-stinking water from the sink.

            No paper towels. He wiped his face on his shirt.

            “Now what?”

            He really didn’t want to go back to his cabin. Surely Bart would look for him there, and he would want to _talk,_ and that was just about the last thing in the world Thad felt like doing right now.

            He checked his pockets: he still had a little bit of cash. Maybe he could find a cheap motel, or—just vibrate into an empty room. It’s not like he’d make a mess.

            The bathroom floor was disgusting, gritty and damp under his bare feet. He walked out.

            The gas station was at the outskirts of the city, and a small line of cars waited at each pump—commuters, he assumed. Nobody paid him any mind. The bright lights of the convenience shore bathed the parking lot in a strange daylight. He wandered in.

            From a display near the back of the store, he selected a cheap pair of rubber flip-flops, and brought them to the counter. The cashier didn’t comment. The shoes cost $7.08. He slipped them on after paying, but he still felt the grime from the bathroom floor under his skin.

            Having no other business here—he wasn’t hungry—he left the store. The lines hadn’t moved. Cars honked in the distance. Downtown, looming and black-bright, to his right, and a backed-up freeway to his left.

            Gotham.

            Once, on one of his recordings, he’d watched Bart help Batman defeat the Joker. It was one of the few times he’d been even mildly impressed with Bart’s ability not to make a situation worse.

            Slowly, because it was awkward to do in flip-flops, he ran into the heart of downtown, then stopped in an empty alley and started walking. It wasn’t too late, yet; the sidewalks were still busy, but nobody spoke to him. They all walked with their heads down and their hands shoved in their pockets. No wonder nobody noticed Batman and his gaggle of maniacs swinging from the rooftops. Thad did the same, to blend in. He followed crowd after crowd aimlessly, walking just to walk.

            He walked for a while, until after night had really taken hold and all the streets buzzed with neon signs and blinking LED displays. He walked past bars, and run-down apartments, and restaurants ranging from gourmet to diner, and at one point he walked by the courthouse.

            The streets began to empty, siphoning off like a draining pool. Feeling exposed, alone on the bright sidewalk, he turned down another dark alley.

            A hand snatched him just behind the collar and yanked him up.

            He crashed hard on his ass, on the rattling grate of a fire escape.

            “You Thad?”

            Thad whipped around, scrambling to the far side of the floor, which wasn’t far.

            A man—not Wally and not Jay. Not Batman, unless Thad had severely misunderstood what Batman looked like. A bat on his chest, though; a red one. One of Batman’s cronies. A leather jacket. A red mask.

            He opened his mouth.

            “Yep,” the man interrupted. “You’re Thad. Right?”

            He could just run, Thad thought. He should just run. But baffled curiosity pressed too hard on his mind.

            “How do you know?”

            “Didn’t at first,” he said. “I’ve grabbed a bunch of other blonds tonight, but none of them had those freaky yellow eyes.” He gestured toward Thad’s face with a gloved hand.

            Thad shook his head. The metal bars were cold, and digging into his shoulder. “No, _how_ did you know who I am?”

            “Right. My brother is a friend of your brother’s.” He was squatting, his arms rested casually on top of his thighs. Thad realized he’d lost one of his flip-flops when he yanked him up.

            “B—he—isn’t my brother,” Thad said, eying the man. Unsure of whether he knew Bart’s real name, and unsure of why he even cared whether or not he did.

            The man shrugged. “Robin isn’t mine, technically. Same dif. He asked me to check on you, and I’m trying to earn some brownie points.”

            Thad pushed himself up into a more dignified seat. “And who are you supposed to be, exactly? Discount Batman?”

            Discount Batman pressed a hand to his chest. “Ouch. Guess I’m more of a local celebrity.” He stood, and began climbing the ladder, which made the whole fire escape jerk and rattle. “Call me Red Hood. For…obvious reasons. Now come on.”

            “Why should I come with you?” Thad asked. Red Hood had already disappeared over the edge of the roof, but he stuck his head out to look at Thad again.

            “Because Robin doesn’t trust you, which means Batman doesn’t either. Trust me—you’d rather spend the night at my place than get tangled up with him.”

            Thad rolled his eyes—as if he couldn’t just run from Batman. But he could run from this idiot, too, and he was intrigued. Plus, wherever Red Hood was taking him had to be better than whatever roach motel he would have ended up in for the night.

            He grabbed hold of the ladder.

            When he made it to the top, stumbling slightly through the dark, Red Hood was standing on the other side of the roof.

            “See the police station?” he asked, pointing to a well-lit building a few blocks away. “I’m under it. Meet you there.”

            He vaulted off the roof and launched a line, and Thad had to admit to himself that it was an impressive display of athleticism. The Bat-lunatics, he supposed, must be rather talented to survive without any powers.

            As Red Hood disappeared into the black silhouettes of the street below, spinning away like a spider riding a filament of web, Thad peered out over the edge. Gotham spread out, dense and lively; it reminded him of the 30th century in a way that cities here rarely did—so much life breathing in all directions at once. So many people.

            For a moment, he tried to see it as President Thawne did: swarming with people like vermin, an infestation to be eradicated.

            It was easier that he would have liked to admit.

           

            Bart’s foot tapped on his kitchen floor.

            “Red Hood’s in contact with him now,” Tim said over the phone. Bart stacked a sandwich high with turkey and cheese. He’d gone back to his apartment after Wally persuaded him to leave Thad alone, for the moment, and let someone else handle “the issue.”

            “Will that help?” he asked. He mixed mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup and slathered it all thickly on each slice of bread.

            Tim sighed. “Honestly? I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell with him.” He paused. “But I think it could help. They have a lot in common, actually.”

            Bart frowned. “Not more than I do.” He vibrated the condiment bottles one by one through the fridge door, which Cissie didn’t like because it sometimes made a mess, but which Bart claimed was “good practice” (though for what, he wasn’t sure).

            “I know that,” Tim said, “but I don’t think Thad wants to believe it. He was conditioned to hate you. That’s a powerful thing.”

            Bart fumbled with the jar of mayonnaise. Eventually he found the shelf inside the fridge and pulled his hand out. “But that’s _why_ we’re the same. Earthgov conditioned me, too.”

            “Just give it time, Bart. But stay on standby—in case you need to get to Gotham, fast. I’ll patch you into the Oracle line, but don’t talk, please.”

            Bart dropped the bottle of mustard in the fridge. “Woah, really?” he said. “That spooky computer you’re always talking to?”

            “She’s not—okay, whatever. Sure.”

            There was a pause, a click, and then a little more background noise on the phone line. Bart forgot about the mustard.

            “Oracle,” Tim said, “I’m putting Impulse on the line. Field names, please.”

            A feminine voice: “Got it, Robin. Hi, Impulse.”

            Bart opened his mouth, then remembered Tim’s rule. He shut it.

            “…I asked him not to speak,” Tim said after a moment of silence. “Trust me on that.”

            “Roger,” Oracle said.

            Bart pulled his cold hand from the fridge. He was a little offended, but he also prided himself these days on an ability to follow orders. He wondered if Batman was listening, too. Or Nightwing. He opened his mouth again to ask—then remembered again.

            The line was silent, except for the light clacking of fingers on a keyboard.

            “Okay, Impulse,” Tim said. “Good job. I’ll text you later.”

            He hung up.

            Bart put the phone on speaker, setting it down on the counter. The keyboard clacking continued. He cut his sandwich into triangles and gobbled it down, then set the plate and knife in the sink.

            “Impulse?” Oracle’s voice was gentle. “I can still hear what you’re doing. If you’re not going to talk, would you mute the phone?”

            Bart jabbed the mute button with his finger. He washed the two dishes, dried them, put them away.

            “You can talk if you want to, you know,” Oracle said. “For now, at least. Everyone else is busy.”

            Bart shifted from foot to foot. He unmuted the phone.

            “I know Robin told you not to,” she said. “But he’s all bark and no bite.”

            “He barks?” Bart blurted. He clamped a hand over his mouth.

            Oracle laughed.

            “So what’s going on with this Thad person?” she asked. “Robin didn’t tell us much.”

            “Um,” Bart said. He scratched at a dried piece of food on another plate in the sink. “He’s a clone of me that President Thawne made to come back in time and attack me—from the future, I mean—I was born in the thirtieth century—and he tried it once but it didn’t work, and then he tried it again except he trapped me in VR like when I was a baby, and then he dyed his hair brown and pretended to be me while Max was getting really sick—”

            “Max Mercury?” Oracle said. Loud, rapid typing on the other end.

            “Yeah. Anyway he—” Bart lost track of where he’d been in the story; he mouthed his last few words to himself. “Oh. In the Speed Force. He tried to kill me ‘n’ Max but then he didn’t want to, I guess, because he ran off into the Speed Force storm and we kinda—assumed he was dead—but last week I found him living in a cabin in the woods. By himself for a few years, I guess. So. Yeah.”

            “Mm,” Oracle said. “And he’s a speedster. He has the same set of powers that you do?”

            “Yeah,” Bart said, “except he can’t make speed scouts.”

            “Speed scouts,” she mumbled. “Well. I assume from the way we’re handling this that he isn’t actively dangerous?”

            “Is that…okay?” Bart asked. He didn’t want more people butting in.

            “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “the world is full of meta-goons who could all turn on each other at any second. At some point, we have to trust each other. Oh—hold on, kiddo. Business calls.”

            Her end of the line went silent.

            Bart shoved his phone into his pocket. The piece of food he’d been scratching at, he realized, was a stain. It wasn’t coming off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thad would fit right in with the dark trinity, change my mind


	7. The Noodles

            Bart tried to take it easy—he really did.

            But there was only so much waiting around he could stand to do, and Oracle never came back on the line after muting him, so a few hours later he found himself in what now passed for Young Justice’s unofficial headquarters—his spaceship, parked in some deserted field that had been arranged for their use by the Justice League.

            To his surprise, he found Tim there, in the rec room, hunched like a gargoyle over his laptop in the dim light. Sneaking up behind him, he opened his mouth to say “boo,” but—

            “Hi, Bart,” Tim said.

            Bart snapped his mouth shut. “You ruined it.”

            “I can see your reflection in the screen.” Tim turned around in his seat. He was in, Bart noticed, a t-shirt and sweatpants, which meant he’d either been here for a while or was planning to stay a while. “What’s up?”

            “Nothing.” Bart shrugged. “Why are you dressed like that?”

            “Just working on a case,” he said. “I needed a change of scenery. The Batcave can get depressing.” He jerked his thumb toward the kitchen. “Kon’s here too.”

            Kon poked his head out from the doorway. “Hey. Want coffee, Tim? I’m making some.”

            “Sure,” Tim said, absently. Bart picked up the remote and turned on the nearby TV; it cast a weird flickery light over the dim room. He nudged the volume down so Tim wouldn’t be distracted. Why did Tim always sit in the dark? Wasn’t it bad for your eyes? From the kitchen, the coffeemaker sputtered.

            “Hey,” Bart called toward the kitchen. “You didn’t offer me any.” He flipped past a show about elephants and landed on a Looney Tunes rerun.

            “Are you kidding?” Kon replied. “I watched you eat coffee ice cream once. You nearly vibrated through the floor.”

            “Did not.”

            “Besides,” Tim said, “you know caffeine doesn’t last for you. And you don’t like the taste.”

            That much was true. Bart wondered if Thad liked coffee. He wondered what Thad was doing. His feet itched to think about it. Even though he’d agreed to leave Thad alone, it felt wrong to not intervene—to _stick his nose in_ , as Cissie liked to say.

            “Cissie keeps giving me wine,” Bart said. “She thinks I can build up a tolerance.”

            Kon carried two mugs into the room. The smell reminded Bart of the grocery store in Manchester—they used to have an aisle of dispensers that ground coffee into little wax-coated paper bags. When he went shopping with Helen, she bought a different kind of coffee every time, which irritated Max, but she didn’t care. She liked walking down the aisle to smell the different varieties in their containers. But the store got rid of the dispensers when Bart was in high school and they only sold pre-bagged coffee after that.

            “Cissie’s just trying to get you drunk,” Kon said. He set one of the mugs down in front of Tim.

            “You’re underage,” Tim said. “So is Cissie.”

            “ _So is Cissie,_ ” Kon mocked. “Lighten up.”

            Tim looked at Bart and took a sip. “Can you?” he asked. “Get drunk?”

            Bart shook his head. On the TV, Bugs Bunny sharpened a razor on a leather strap. “No,” he said, “I only feel it for a second. I chugged a lot once, but it just made me sick and Cissie got mad at me for drinking all her good wine.”

            Kon laughed, a slightly mean-spirited cackle that Bart had grown used to over the years. Looney Tunes rolled into a commercial for a special kind of cake pans. Bart wondered if Thad had ever tried to get drunk. He wondered if Thad ever had the desire to drink, since he was never around anyone and therefore wouldn’t feel left out in a crowd of drunk friends. What was he doing in Gotham?

            Bart looked over Tim’s shoulder.

            “What are you working on?” he asked. He couldn’t make sense of the jumble of windows and inputs; the Batcomputer or whatever must run on some kind of custom OS, he figured, because it wasn’t like anything he’d seen in this or any other century. It looked—purposefully confusing. Different designs all mixed in together.

            “Nothing important. What happened with the Flash?” Tim asked. Translation _: I can’t talk about it, so I’m changing the subject._

“Something happened?” Kon asked, leaning against the doorjamb of the kitchen. Kon didn’t know about Thad yet, but he should know if Tim knew. The three of them didn’t keep secrets—well, except the time that Bart broke Tim’s expensive camera and Kon swore not to tell after he caught Bart trying to hot-glue the pieces back together—or the time that Young Justice threw Kon a “not a birthday” surprise party, which seemed to have bummed Kon out at first, but he eventually ended up having fun...they just couldn’t call it a birthday party because Kon didn’t really have a birthday because he wasn’t really born—

            “You’re a clone!” Bart blurted. Kon made a face like he had done something weird.

            “Yeah...?” Kon said. “And you have gigantic feet. Is that the game we’re playing now?”

            “Now, I mean—” Bart backtracked. “What happened with the Flash is that Thad riled him up and he punched him.” Noting the lack of comprehension on Kon’s face, he backtracked again. “Thad is back. My clone.”

            “Oy,” Kon said. “Start over. Your clone is back—the one that posed as you for months?”

            “Yeah,” Bart said. “He has a dog. And a house.”

            “And he punched the Flash?”

            What was so difficult about this? Bart glanced at the TV.

            “No, he punched Thad.”

            Still commercials—for fruit snacks, now. Bart looked back at Kon, who had his eyebrows raised, as if waiting.

            “And...?”

            “And what?” Bart asked. That was the end of the story. It wasn’t very exciting. Actually he felt a little bad, telling it.

            Tim sighed. “And Thad isn’t a villain anymore, supposedly. According to Bart, he’s sitting in the general area of reformed.”

            “Oh,” said Kon. He took a long sip of coffee. “Weird. You really gonna vouch for a nutcase like that?”

            Bart hesitated. He didn’t want to say that Thad was totally fine, because that felt like a lie.

            “He just needs some attention,” he finally said. Attention. That was Max’s phrase—saying that things needed attention when really they were problems. As in, _The gutters need attention,_ which meant that he wanted Bart to go up and clean the gutters. Or, when some bad guy was trashing downtown Manchester and they saw it on the news while eating dinner: _That looks like it needs our attention._

            And he said it about Bart, too, in the beginning. _The boy needs attention. The boy needs a_ lot _of attention._ Which Bart had, at first, taken to mean that Max would play games with him, or go to the movies, when what it really meant was more training, more education, pushing Bart so hard that he went to bed each night with aching knees and the bright colors of exhaustion swirling behind his eyelids.

            Kon was taking another drink, tilting the cup back further now like maybe it was half empty. What were they talking about? Thad—Wally—no, Thad. And Kon? Oh—clones.

            “You could talk to him,” Bart said.

            “Pass.”

            Tim turned back to his work, though he sat straighter now as he typed, not so hunched-over and weird-looking.

            “One of you is enough,” Kon said. “I think two Barts would give me an ulcer.”

            Bart squinted at Kon. “Ulcers are caused by bacteria.”

            “He’s right,” Tim said, clacking away at the keys. “H. pylori.”

            Kon rolled his eyes. “Great. The walking encyclopedias.” He looked at Bart, swirling the coffee around in its mug. “Your clone. He got a big stick up his ass about it?”

            Tim laughed, even though he tried to pretend it was a cough. Bart definitely knew _that_ phrase: Kon used it all the time to describe Batman, and sometimes Superman or the Flash or, come to think of it, just sort of anyone older than him.

            Bart didn’t know how to answer the question, though, so he snatched a bag of popcorn from the kitchen and flopped down onto the couch. The commercial break had ended; another cartoon came on.

            “Be patient, Bart,” Tim said. “It’s handled right now.”

            The conversation moved on, but Bart quickly lost interest, a little prickly as he sank deeper into the couch cushions. Why did everyone else think they knew what was best for Thad? Shouldn’t he know? He fiddled with the buttons on the remote, flipping the audio from English to Spanish and back again, over and over, until he’d stopped feeling prickly and something new occurred to him.

            He peeked over the back of the couch. “You’re really different from Superman.”

            “I’m only half Superman,” Kon pointed out. He looked a little unhappy about it. Bart settled back into his seat.

            “Right.”

 

            Thad waited in a fortified bunker underneath the Gotham police department.

            Even with the Red Hood’s head start, Thad had beaten him here—duh—vibrating down through the ground before anyone upstairs had even noticed him. For a second, he’d thought to keep going, straight through to the other side; he could just slip away, invisible. He didn’t get the sense that this Red Hood person wanted him all that bad anyway; what had he called it? _Earning some good graces_? From whom?

            But he stayed and waited. The bunker, the hideout, whatever, was a fairly basic setup—as primitive as anything else in this era. Small, but not cramped. No windows, of course, but well-lit with gently flickering fluorescent lights. A bathroom, and an old cot shoved into one corner, and a desk with a computer. Guns and weaponry everywhere. He could take some if he wanted, but what on Earth did he need a gun for? He left them alone.

            A bulletin board hung above the desk, on which only a few things had been pinned. A ticket stub to a hockey game. A photo, torn at the edges, of Batman and Robin. A crayon drawing of Red Hood with what looked like an ugly blue Superman. Thad fingered the edge of the paper, tugging it away just slightly from its pushpin. The paper was new. Something crawled up his stomach. Even this Bat-nutcase had friends, apparently. He looked down.

            By the computer, more or less in plain sight, a small packet of papers had been laid out with a photo of him on top. No, not a photo—he lifted it up. A copy of a pencil drawing of him, signed “ ~~B~~ Impulse.” Thad rolled his eyes. He set the picture aside, and looked at the document underneath.

            Name: Thaddeus “Thad” Thawne II

            Alias: Inertia

            DOB: ca. 2980s

            Occupation: Unknown

            Height: 5’1”

            He set the paper down. The desk, otherwise, was clean; no other papers were out of place. He was _meant_ to see these. A message that their little super-community was watching him.

            And where was Red Hood, anyway?

            He glanced at the computer, its fan humming gently, turned on. It would probably be simple to hack in—simpler if he still had Craydl—and get to all their little files and. It could be simple, or it could get him in more trouble than it was worth; he didn’t know why he even wanted to. He looked at the bulletin board again. Aside from all the guns, he thought, this could pass for a normal office.

            He wandered over to the cot and sat down. It gave to his weight with a springy creak.

            Life had been simpler, he thought, a month ago, a week ago—before Bart showed his stupid face like some cruel joke the universe was playing on him. He could have gone on living like that forever—slowly aging and eventually dying, alone, normal. Just him and Ivan—stubbornly, spitefully normal. Wasn’t that the best possible revenge? Hadn’t he had time to think, thought, decided?

            The hum of the lights swelled in his head. Now that he’d noticed it, it was a deafening static, expanding in his lungs and his bones until there was no room for thought or feeling or anything else. He reclined and closed his eyes; he sank into the noise like a warm bath/

            He fell asleep.

 

            And woke some amount of time later to a paper bag dropped in the center of his chest and a masked man looming over him, smirking, a red helmet clutched in the crook of his elbow.

            He blinked. Right.

            The bottom of the bag was hot against him; even through his shirt it was nearly hot enough to burn. As he sat up and pulled it away, the smell of fried meat and ginger crumpled from the top of the bag.

            “Hungry?” Red Hood said. Without his helmet on, he looked—younger than Thad expected.

            Thad unrolled the top of the bag and found Chinese food containers stacked inside. The lack of windows in the room disoriented him. “What time is it?”

            “Dinnertime.” Red Hood set his helmet down on the desk, where another, smaller bag of food waited.

            Thad eyed a pistol as Red Hood unstrapped it from his thigh. “Do you use those?”

            “Yeah, but don’t tell anyone,” Red Hood said. “I’ve got a sparkling reputation to maintain.”

            The edge of sarcasm put Thad on edge. But even though it felt like the middle of the night, he _was_ hungry. He pulled out a carton at random and unfolded the flaps—lo mein. Hot and fresh. Salty and delicious. He had the brief urge to say thank you, and swallowed it.

            Red Hood kicked his feet up on the desk, his boot sole landing right on Thad’s file.

            “So,” he said. “Young, dumb, and full of shit, huh?”

            Thad swallowed a thick clump of noodles. “What?”

            Red Hood shoved a dumpling in his cheek. “Listen, kid, I don’t really know you—and frankly, I don’t care all that much—but since my job is apparently to be the Patron Saint of Black Sheep—” he spread his arms wide, platter in one hand and chopsticks in the other—“take some advice from someone older and wiser.”

            “I’m older than you, technically.”

            “Whatever. Listen—” he pointed his chopsticks at Thad, brandishing them like a knife. “You’ve probably got a lot of rage in there, right? Just boiling out from your guts to your fingertips, right? Like everything that ever happened to you is unfair. Like everyone else is living a charmed little life and you’re shut out of it like a monkey trapped in the zoo.”

            Shivers crawled out from the base of Thad’s neck. No, he wanted to say, but his tongue wouldn’t shape the word.

            Red Hood poked around at his dumplings with the chopsticks. “I’m not gonna lie,” he continued. “That anger? That rage? It feels damn good. And it’ll get you pretty far. It will. But one day you’ll wake up and realize you have nothing left. Nothing and nobody.”

            He looked up, right at Thad, who was suddenly glad he couldn’t see Red Hood’s eyes through the mask.

            “The funny thing about being a sinking ship, kid,” he said, “is that eventually everyone stops trying to bail you out.”

            Thad swallowed. “You don’t know anything about me.”

            Red Hood smiled again, thinly. “Nobody does, right? Maybe that’s the problem.”

            Thad didn’t say anything. He felt—transparent. He didn’t like it. The carton of noodles burned his hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to move, not even to put them down.

            A low mumble, like chatter on a CB radio, issued from the computer’s speakers. The voice sounded like a woman’s, though Thad couldn’t make it out from the cot.

            Red Hood took a deep swig from a cup of egg drop soup and heaved himself up. “Alright,” he said, “I’ve paid my dues. Now I’ve got business.” Leaving the half-eaten food on the desk, he slipped his helmet back on; it fastened with a click. “Feel free to keep crashing here, or don’t,” he said. “No skin off my nose.”

            His voice, Thad noted, was hollower from inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not altogether satisfied with this chapter, but it's been a while, and I needed to cut it off because the next scene is quite lengthy. Oh well! I should have more soon. Thanks for the wonderful reviews!


	8. The Gun

            Bart had nearly fallen asleep on the couch, lulled by the TV and the steady clacking of Tim’s keyboard, when the alarm went off, a shrill whining he’d come to find about as annoying as the alarm clock he used in high school. No—this was less annoying; it meant action, and that was so much better than cramming himself into a desk for seven hours a day, pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

            Sophomore year, he’d been tempted to drop out of school. It was around then that he realized he just wasn’t interested in any “normal” careers; he couldn’t be a mechanic, or a scientist, or work in an office. Preston had nearly talked him into going to film school with him, until Bart realized that film school was still _school_. So Preston had gone off to California, which made Bart sad to think about, but it was also a relief. It was hard for Bart to be around people he had to keep secrets from, and Impulse never stopped feeling like a secret too big to manage.

            But when he’d declared his intention to drop out of high school, Helen had descended on him with so much stern disappointment that it somehow became out of the question. She told him: _Get your diploma in case you change your mind._ Which, Bart knew, meant: _You will probably change your mind._ Which he guessed was fair. He’d quit being Impulse once, and he’d quit Young Justice once, and neither of those had stuck, so what did he know?

            Carol had been more understanding about the dropping-out thing. She thought it was a bad idea, too, but she knew how miserable the whole school thing made him, even though in high school they didn’t have many of the same classes together. She was in all honors classes, and while Bart understood the stuff she was learning, his grades weren’t high enough to be allowed in honors. So he got stuck in the standard classes, which were even more boring because they were easy, and so the rest of high school dragged on: no major crises, no huge developments. Just days in school and weekends with friends, fighting crime on the side, and if the rest of his life could be like that—minus the school—he would have been happy, he figured.

            Except that, no matter how steadfastly he kept on being himself, the world kept changing around him. Max gone. Helen married—not that he wasn’t happy for her, but her husband wasn’t in on the secret—Preston in California and Carol in college, and Young Justice “formally” disbanded though they continued to meet up (and if something happened while they were all together, who could blame them for responding as a group?).

            Kon snapped his fingers in front of Bart’s face. “Earth to Future Boy. Let’s _go_.”

            Right—the alarm.

            They loaded into the Super-Cycle. It occurred to Bart how long it had been since it was just the three of them, together. Despite everything—it was comforting. He propped his feet up against the back of Kon’s headrest, which earned him a stiff punch in the leg.

            The flight wasn’t long. They arrived above some suburban office complex, a line of buildings all identical and boring, where a ring of flashing police cars threw blue and red lights all over the stucco walls.

            Tim pointed down. “Armed men are holding the morning cleaning crew inside.” He steered the Super-Cycle down to the roof of a neighboring building.

            Bart blinked. Was it really morning? The sky above was deep and flush with stars, but there was, indeed, a thin line of light blue on one edge of the horizon. He’d been up all night—since the morning of the cookout. Oops. He stood to get out of the Cycle, except when he stepped out, one of his feet stuck to the floor and he tripped forward and clunked his shin against the side.

            “Kon,” Tim said. Kon snickered and released his hold on the Cycle.

            Tim slunk down off the roof, his cape weird and liquid in the darkness. Bart tumbled out and righted himself, slapping Kon on the arm. His head felt—sluggish. Relatively. He stifled a yawn. Kon didn’t notice.

            It wasn’t long before Tim rose back over the edge of the roof. “I talked to the police,” he said. “Three armed men, maybe more, on the fourth floor. Four or five hostages. There’s been one shot fired, but all the blinds are closed, so they’re not sure what’s going on.”

            “What happened to the fun villains we used to fight?” Kon asked.

            “I’m sorry this hostage situation isn’t quirky enough for you,” Tim said. “Bart—go take a look. Recon only. Come back and fill us in.”

            Bart was always recon. He saluted and ran off, down to the street, inside, and up the stairs. The lights in the building were off, desks and file cabinets unsettlingly shadowed and empty, but sometimes places like these had motion sensor lights, so he kept moving, too fast to register. He zipped into the fourth floor just an instant, sticking to the edges to avoid making a breeze; here, a couple lamps had been turned on, illuminating only the edges of faces and the glinting of guns.

            Two gunmen, six hostages, all of whom appeared to be unhurt. A bullet hole in the ceiling—from a warning shot, maybe. Bart repeated the numbers so he wouldn’t forget: two gunmen, six hostages. Two gunmen, six hostages. None of them had moved more than an inch since he’d come in. He phased down through the floor, and out again.

            “Just two gunmen,” he reported to Tim when he returned. “Six hostages along the far wall and they’re all fine.”

            “Are you sure? The police said at least three gunmen.”

            “I didn’t see anyone else.”

            Tim considered for a second. The sliver of light in the sky had widened, like a door pried open just an inch by the breeze.

            “Okay,” Tim said. “Bart, take Kon up there and drop him. Disarm the gunmen while Kon holds them in place.” He handed Bart two lightweight pairs of handcuffs. “Carry the hostages to the police. _Gently_. Clear?”

            “Crystal,” Kon said.

            Really, Bart thought, this was totally something he could do alone. Kon could probably do it alone, too. Or Tim. But their fearless leader didn’t take risks—especially not when innocent lives were in danger. Anyway, he figured, they _were_ all here, so why not?

            Bart grabbed Kon by the hand and tugged him to the bottom of the office building. Pulling him was always a weird sensation—like pulling a really heavy balloon.

            “You’re like a really heavy balloon,” Bart whispered, because he thought it was kind of a neat simile. He shifted Kon higher and eyed the window that was close to the gunmen.

            “Your head’s a balloon.”

            Then they were up the wall and through it, back into the dim lamp-light, the soft hum of air conditioning, the air needlessly chilly and dry. Bart dropped Kon and, before the two gunmen could blink, snatched their guns and dumped them on the other side of the room. And then, for a second, he lingered in the quiet—it was always hilarious to watch people’s faces when they realized they were no longer holding what they had been.

            The moment passed. Their faces shifted like gears from shock to realization to anger, and they tried to move, to step forward, but Kon had his hands on the floor, and they were rooted in place. A couple of the hostages gasped and murmured amongst themselves, still afraid to make a sound.

            “Don’t worry, citizens,” Kon said in his faux-deep voice, which he liked to do as a joke, though Bart found it more weird than funny. He’d left the gunmen’s arms loose, which they currently flailed and thrashed, but it was easy enough for Bart to cuff their hands together while they seethed and spat and swore. The hostages were still oddly hushed. In shock, maybe. Bart considered what a bad day these people had had. Probably worse than his. That was weirdly comforting, too.

            Kon scooped up the gunmen and flew through the window to deposit them outside. Bart picked up the first woman in the row of kneeling hostages along the wall, threw her over his shoulder— _gently_ —and carried her down, not quite fast enough to make her ill. He dropped her by a cop and zipped back up. Part of him thought maybe he should have asked if she was okay, but something about the whole situation unnerved him and a little bit of burnt-orange had joined the light blue on the horizon, and he knew if he didn’t get to bed soon he’d have to fall asleep in full daylight, which he’d never been good at.

            He grabbed the second hostage, a middle-aged man with rumpled-sweaty hair. Again, he hauled the man over his shoulder—

            A searing pain ripped through his leg, and then a boom, a little crack in the air like thunder.

            He dumped the man, the muzzle of the gun in his hand—where was that a second ago?—belching a thin wisp of smoke. Bart twisted to look over his shoulder. The man ad been hiding the gun—where?—so he wasn’t really a hostage—and the bullet—the bullet was still moving inside him, wedging deep into the muscle of his thigh, the flesh of the entry point still yawning wide.

            He vibrated. The bullet passed out of him without doing any more damage, landing bloody on the floor across the room. _Grife_ , it hurt—the skin and muscle blown open in his leg were slamming back together again—before the man could react, Bart snatched his gun—still warm—and threw it across the room where it clattered on the floor.

            A deep ache spread from his leg. He pulled a ziptie from a pouch on his boot and tied the third gunman’s hands together. Helen had taught him how to truss a turkey one Thanksgiving—why was he thinking of that?—one of the remaining hostages had begun to cry. Bart bent to press his hand to the bleeding wound on the back of his calf. He wondered again if he should say something.

            Kon’s face reappeared in the window.

            “What happened?”

            “The third one was disguised as a hostage,” Bart said. He touched the bullet hole again. “Ow.”

            “Shit,” Kon said. He nudged the third gunman, who sneered up at him from the floor, with his foot. Bart eased his way into an office chair and stretched his leg out in front of him. The muscle around the wound ached; already it was starting to clot and heal.

            “You okay?” Kon asked. He picked up the gunman by the back of a shirt, like a scruffed cat.

            “Yeah,” Bart said. “Gimme a minute.” He sat on his hands so he wouldn’t rub at the wound. He’d learned from Max, and from Wally—really, a lot of people had beat him over the head with this lesson—that while speedsters were injured less frequently, the injuries they _did_ get should be treated very seriously. They healed fast, so if they healed wrong, it could cause a lot of problems.

            Kon hauled the third gunman outside. One of the remaining hostages, a young-looking man, shook his head, looking balefully up at Bart.

            “I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry,” he blubbered. “I wanted to tell you—”

            “’S okay,” Bart said. He glanced at the gun on the floor, barely visible though he knew exactly where it was. The ache in his leg deepened, radiating up to his hip, and he wondered if it was supposed to feel like that.

            The room went weirdly quiet again. Dim red and blue light flashed in from the window Kon had opened, and vague voices floated in from below. Absently, Bart scratched at the bullet hole, because it itched; the skin had nearly closed, but the outside was still wet with blood that came away on his fingertips. He wiped them on the red part of his suit. Then he thought: well, I need a new one anyway. Blood all over his leg. Blood stains on white fabric were impossible to get out. He thought of the outfit his grown self had had in the future, which was mostly purple. He wondered if that was why it was purple. Then he moved away from that thought.

            Kon came back for the last of the hostages, and glanced at Bart, who gave him a thumbs-up. When Kon and the hostages left, the room suddenly seemed—mundane. Just a normal office building, like nothing scary had happened there. Kon returned and picked Bart up, and Bart bit down on the inside of his cheek as the motion jostled his leg—it felt like one gigantic bruise, creeping all over the inside of his leg.

            When they touched down on the ground, where the hostages were being given blankets—Bart was sure those blankets had a name, though he didn’t know it—and the police pressed the gunmen into a truck, Tim practically marched over to where they stood, Bart’s arm around Kon’s shoulders so he could stand.

            “Are you okay?”

            Bart flexed his leg experimentally.

            “Don’t move it,” Tim said. He crouched and pulled a pen-sized flashlight from his belt.

            “I’ve never been shot before,” Bart realized. “That’s kinda cool, right?”

            “Yeah, super cool,” Kon said. Bart assumed this was sarcastic.

            Tim held his flashlight between his teeth and gently examined the wound, pulling shredded bits of fabric away from wet skin, wiping at the skin—fully closed by now—with a cold, damp cloth that smelled like alcohol.

            “Ow,” Bart complained.

            “You’re lucky it didn’t hit the bone,” Tim said. “That would have been a mess.”

            “Aren’t there EMTs for this?” Bart asked. He looked at an ambulance parked nearby. Its side gleamed in the orange light of the rising sun.

            “Yes, but I doubt they have experience with Flash-speed healing.”

            “And you do?” Kon said.

            “You do if you’re trained by Batman.” Tim stood. “You should go rest. Take an antibiotic. Keep it clean. Kon and I will stay and make sure everything is cool.”

            Resting—he was sure he couldn’t sleep now; his head buzzed with weird excitement. He was too tired to sleep. But it would be nice to be home, maybe. He took a step forward.

            Kon held tight to his arm.

            “Slow your roll, dumbass,” he said. “You can’t run on that.”

            “How am I supposed to get home?”

            Tim pressed his fingers to his ear. “Oracle,” he said. “See if you can reach the Flash. Impulse was injured; he’s fine, but he needs to rest at home.”

            Bart scrambled for his phone and jabbed unmute. “Hi, Oracle!”

            “Hi, Bart.”

            He grinned, and wondered what she looked like. Maybe she was Batman’s daughter? He wondered if he should ask about Thad, but then she was talking again.

            “The Flash is busy. I’ll try—"

            A blur and a breeze, and then Thad stood in front of Bart, dressed in the same drab clothes he’d been wearing when he ran from the picnic. Whatever Oracle was saying slipped right out of Bart’s ear. He wondered if this was how Thad felt when he showed up at his door—utterly shocked. But pleasantly?

            Probably not.

            Thad regarded him for a moment, arms crossed, his face plain in its disdain. Kon tightened his arm around Bart’s shoulder.

            Then Thad huffed. “You got _shot_?”

            Bart was silent.

            “You know we can move _much_ faster than a bullet.” There was a cruel little smile forming on Thad’s mouth, the same kind of smile he’d given Wally just before he got popped. It made Bart—angry. He didn’t want Thad to be doing that. It wasn’t just that Bart didn’t want to be mocked; he wanted Thad to know better, and apparently he didn’t.

            “Max got shot once,” Bart said. The smile dropped from Thad’s face, curling down into a grim line.

            “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m taking you to your apartment.”

            Bart nodded at Kon, who released him, and hopped unsteadily toward Thad. “How did you know? Is this a twin thing?”

            “We’re not twins,” Thad said. He reached forward and hoisted Bart up onto his shoulders, which jostled his leg pretty bad.

            “Your little Oracle feed,” Thad said to Tim, “plays constantly in Red Hood’s little cave.”

            “Enough with the littles.” Kon rolled his eyes.

            Bart tried to adjust himself, not-so-accidentally jabbing his elbow into Thad’s shoulder. “See you guys—” he started, and then Thad was running toward Alabama.

            “That was rude.”

            “Just be grateful I’m hauling you anywhere.”

            “Super grateful,” Bart muttered.

            They hit the general area of Tennessee, somewhere up in the mountains, when Thad slowed. The air was dewy here and already light; they’d chased the sunrise east.

            “Where am I going?” Thad finally called over the wind.

            “Oh,” Bart said. ”Start from Manchester and head northeast. I’ll tell you from there.”

            Thad said nothing, but kicked up his speed again, following Bart’s directions. The mountains around them melted into hills, and they flashed past Manchester and away again.

            “Isn’t it funny that I know where you live and you don’t know where I live?”

            “Hilarious.”

            They went the rest of the way—a few seconds, maybe—in silence, aside from Bart saying ”left” or ”right” until they had reached Bart and Cissie’s apartment and Thad was dumping Bart on the couch.

            Bart settled back into the cushions, which were overstuffed and vaguely suede. His leg still ached up-and-down, and he wanted to change out of his suit, but he didn’t think Thad would agree to bring him some clothes from the other room. He’d feel better soon, anyway. He slung his leg up on the couch, nestling his shoe into some throw pillows that didn’t match each other or anything else.

            Thad was turning to leave.

            ”Why did you help me?” Bart blurted. The ceiling fan rocked back and forth as it spun, a little breeze settling on Bart’s clammy face. He shivered.

            Thad didn’t turn all the way back to face Bart, but he hesitated. It was a long pause—long for them, at least—before he spoke.

            ”I don’t want to be a...an attack dog,” he said. ”I’m trying not to be.”

            Bart thought it was the quietest thing he’d ever heard him say. He rubbed his leg, lightly, absently, to give his hands something to do.

            ”You don’t have to go, you know,” he said. ”You could...hang out.”

            Thad turned a little more to face him. The light from the windows was dusky and yellow. Bart couldn’t remember the last time he was up this early.

            ”And do what?”

            ”I dunno,” Bart said. ”Play video games?” He didn’t really know what Thad would enjoy, to be honest—maybe that was the problem. Did he like games? Did he like _anything_? It was an excruciatingly long moment before he spoke again.

            ”...Okay,” he said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and, hunching like it might make him disappear, he sat down stiffly in the armchair cattycorner to the couch.

            Bart grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. Thad looked around the apartment, slowly, as if examining a crime scene.

            ”You live with Arrowette?” he asked. Bart followed his eyes to the bow displayed on the wall.

            ”Oh, yeah.” Bart snatched a game controller from the coffee table and turned on the console. ”I think she’s asleep.”

            Thad said nothing.

            Bart flipped through the console’s menu. ”What do you want to play?” he asked, a little tentatively. He thought of Max’s advice, good for both animals and people: no sudden movements. This was on a hunting trip, which, Max had explained, was what fathers and sons did, especially in Alabama.

            _Aren’t sudden movements our whole thing?_ he’d replied, to which Max had sighed.

            ”I—I don’t know,” Thad said. ”It doesn’t matter.”

            Bart tossed him the second controller. He picked an old game, thinking maybe Thad had played it before; either way, neither said anything as they began the co-op mode, and they played in silence for a few minutes, the volume turned down uncomfortably low.

            The quiet stretched on, and the living room lightened with morning. The music of the game was faint, a buzzing chiptune with a slow beat. There was a weird precariousness to the air, and so Bart was afraid to say anything, or do much of anything at all. He wished Cissie was in the room, to help make conversation. She usually knew what to say. Even if it was rude. He tried his best, without speaking, to pretend to be surprised when Thad found a bonus level. He wasn’t sure Thad noticed.

            They cleared a few levels together, working easily, though Thad liked to hang around and push down around the borders of the screen for collectables that Bart had long ago collected. Bart forced himself to be patient; to let Thad take as much time as he wanted. No sudden movements. They hadn’t shot anything on that hunting trip. In retrospect, he was surprised Max gave him a gun.

            What he wanted was for Thad to do something, to say something—to push them into the realm of normalcy. It felt like they were on borrowed time right now, like they’d slipped the train track of how things were supposed to be, and Bart didn’t know how to make it okay.

            So he just kept playing.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wowie, this is now 100 pages long! How’s everyone been doing?


	9. The Dream

            “I didn’t mean it,” Thad said, quietly. “What I said to Wally.”

            Bart’s response came fast, as if the question had been straining in his throat for hours: “Then why’d you say it?” He looked at Thad and away again, quick. Everything about him was fragile and nervous. For the briefest of moments, Thad was washed through with anger.

            He held it back, though. His character jumped ahead of Bart’s, completing the level. The screen faded to black. In the glass’s muddy reflection, Thad saw the two of them, sitting—their nearly-identical faces; his wrinkled clothe; Bart’s bloody uniform.

            The next level started. With it rose soft music, peppy and polka-like.

             “I don’t know,“ Thad said. He was so aware, then, of the texture of the controller in his hands, the plastic speckled with tiny bumps. He ran his thumb over the hard, round edges and wondered who had assembled this thing. “I just—wanted to—“

            Wanted to _what_? The words were there, but they got stuck behind his teeth. He thought of the Red Hood. Strange and abrasive as the man had been, his hideout still showed evidence of other people. Mementos and trinkets and photographs of—who? Friends? Family?

            Family. The meaning of it—

            They kept playing. The level’s boss dropped down onto the screen.

            “Wanted to what?“ Bart finally prompted.

            Thad considered the question, rolled it around in his mouth. “Wanted to—prove something. That I’m not what he thinks I am.”

            _There it is_ , he thought. The honest truth. Something shifted in the room—like the whisper-soft cracking of ice all over the world on a cold spring morning.

            “But didn’t you act _exactly_ like what he thinks you are?“

            Thad snorted. He hit the boss a few times, and Bart’s character hovered back and let him have it, this simulated violence, which felt neither good nor bad—just easy.

            “It wasn’t my brightest moment,“ he admitted. “It’s just—watching their little family—doesn’t it make you angry?“

            “Does my family make me angry...?”

            “Come on,“ Thad said. “You _have_ to think about it.“

            Bart frowned.

            “No...?”

            Thad looked over at him—his stupid pitiful big eyes—did _he_ ever look like _that_? He threw his controller to the carpet, and the sound it made was disappointingly soft.

            “Come _on_ ,“ he said. Distantly, he was aware that their characters were dying. “All the things that were taken from you—from us—” He swallowed. “We were raised in isolation. Out of touch with reality. We can’t even _live_ in the time that we’re from.“

            Bart fiddled with the rotating sticks on his controller.

            “I dunno,“ he said. “It makes me said, I guess. It doesn’t make me angry.”

            Thad’s anger deflated, a bullet robbed of momentum. The boss fight reloaded, and Bart moved his character again, defending Thad’s from the boss’ blows.

            “Grife.” Thad plucked his controller from the ground. Bart let out a slow breath.

            They beat the boss easily, and started the next level, and Thad felt both uneasy and relaxed at once. He thought of the time he found an injured fox in the woods outside his home, and how it had trembled at his touch but was powerless to run. Its fur, when he touched it, was matted with blood.

            Nothing to do but kill it, of course, but it shocked him how often he thought about it.

            The doorknob behind the couch turned, and Thad tensed as, from her bedroom, a sleepy-eyed Cissie emerged. In the moment before she registered what she saw, Thad gave Bart a frantic and questioning look, and Bart shrugged and kept playing, so Thad did, too.

            “Morning,” she said to Bart. When she noticed Thad an instant later, she composed a decent straight face, but there was no masking the flash of surprise in her eyes.

            “Hey,” was all she said.

            “Hello,” he replied.

            She lingered for a moment, and then went to the kitchen, from where clattered the opening and closing of cabinets and the rattle of dry cereal in a bowl. Thad thought about how different she looked now—less skinny, with the fat of adulthood having settled around her face and arms. Time had passed since—since he was Bart. A deep discomfort clouded in his gut.

            Cissie returned with her breakfast and leaned over the back of the couch.

            “What happened to your leg?” she asked.

            “Got shot,” Bart said. He didn’t take his eyes from the screen.

            Cissie _tsk_ ed, and plunged her fingers into his mess of hair to ruffle it. “Slower than a speeding bullet, huh? Does it hurt?”

            “Kinda.” Bart shifted in his seat, as if the question had made him more aware of the pain. The blood in his costume had dried by now, but was still clearly visible, bright as snow. It made an uncomfortable presence in the room.

            “Want some painkillers?”

            Bart shrugged. “Nah,” he said. “Thanks.”

            Cissie shoved a spoonful of cereal into her mouth and came around the front of the couch. Perching on its arm, she watched them play.

            Thad looked at her again, unsure of what, exactly, he was looking for.

            “So,” she said. “Thad. That’s your name, right? Can I call you that?”

            “What else would you call me?”

            Bart frowned, a little.

            Cissie shrugged. “Thaddeus. Inertia. Jim-Bob. Julia.”

            Was she joking? She was—casual. But serious? Thad struggled to keep up with the game _and_ her inscrutable face, and his character dropped off a ledge, but he eventually said, politely, “’Thad’ is fine.”

            “I’m Cissie.” She raised her hand, still holding a spoon, in a half-wave. “Bart’s roommate.”

            “I know who you are,” he snipped, irritated because she was laying down a line of conversation he couldn’t see the end of.

            “You don’t, though, do you?” she asked, with a humorless smile.

            Thad kept his eyes on the screen. “Cissie King-Jones,” he recited. “Arrowette. Your mother is Bonnie King, the former Arrowette. You’re from Alabama, which is where you met Impulse and Max Mercury. You joined Young Justice and quit, then won a gold medal in archery at the Sydney Olympics.”

            “Okay,” she said. “You know me the way I know Julia Roberts—which is not really, except that I’ve read her Wikipedia page and saw her at a party once, though I couldn’t really talk to her because I was only ever a D-list celebrity at best.”

            Bart rubbed at his wound, glanced worriedly back at the kitchen, and opened his mouth, but was cut off by Cissie, who brandished her spoon like a baton.

            “How many times did we interact when you were posing as Bart? Twice? Once?”

            “Three...times.”

            She nodded, as if she had just won some argument Thad wasn’t even aware of. He ground his teeth into the side of his tongue as one of the game’s enemies landed a hit.

            “Bart,” Cissie asked, “what’s my favorite color?”

            “Blue,” Bart said. “Cissie, I’m—”

            “See,” she said. “Bart knows me, and I know Bart. We’re _friends_.  We’ve been friends for a long time.” She took a measured bite of cereal and looked at Thad, and Thad looked back, and suddenly felt like he was staring down the barrel of a gun.

            “I don’t know you, Thad. I know _about_ you, but I don’t know you. And you don’t know me.”

            Thad gripped his controller tight. She was right—and why should it matter—but why did it annoy him that she was right?

            She watched them play as she finished her bowl of cereal, and eventually Thad relaxed into the game again, the mindless rhythm of it. He wondered how long Bart expected him to stay here. He wondered how long he wanted to stay here.

            “Alright,” Cissie said, walking back to the kitchen to rinse her bowl. “I got work. See you later, Bart.” She paused by the front door as she pulled a thick ring of keys from a hook. “It was nice meeting you, Thad.”

            Thad glanced outside through the back door, out to where a squirrel ran up a tree to a bird feeder and pilfered bird seed like its life depended on it. Which—maybe it did. Some weird thing inside him urged him to be polite, now, and so he turned back to Cissie and said with someone else’s voice, “You too.”

            The door opened and shut. Quiet in its wake.

            Outside, faint birdsong—Thad recognized the sound, but didn’t know the bird--and inside, nothing but the clack of fingers on buttons. At some point, the air conditioner kicked on, a comforting low hum from somewhere in the direction of the kitchen.

           

            They played in silence for a while longer. Bart was getting sleepy—the colorful lines fainting and wiggled into each other—and the drowsy haze was comfortable, he thought, his eyes fluttering shut—it was hard to keep them open, to keep his head up—comfortable. The pain. In his legs. His leg. Which one? Bridging from one to the other. Lightning rod. Like a dark red thumping, like. A beat. On a tight drumskin—his heartbeat—punching all the way up. Into his head. A dull headache.

            He fell asleep.

            And as he slept, he dreamed.

            He dreamed of a house in Manchester where every room connected to every other room, and every door was wide open to the outside world, and outside was orange and pink and the sun was a huge disk erasing half of the sky. Bart stepped out into a neighborhood he didn’t recognize and some of the houses were upside down, their eaves like the gaping underbites of waiting mouths, but somehow they weren’t frightening. Everything was the same as everything else. He turned back toward the house and found the ocean there instead, and when he stepped out onto that boiling sea, steam wrapped around his ankles, but his feet glazed over the surface it as if it were marble.

            He heard a voice, from somewhere, but he couldn’t understand it.

 

            When Bart’s character stopped moving, lifelessly dragged along the back edge of the screen, Thad looked up to find that his head had lolled down over his chest. Asleep. Thad rolled his eyes.

            Bart’s character eventually died, and Thad set his controller aside and leaned his head against the chair’s soft back. He had no reason to stay, now; he should go home. He needed to go home. He needed to feed Ivan. But his legs felt like air, empty of muscle and lightning, and his eyelids sank.

            Ivan. He remembered—waking up under that RV, his first night out of the Speed Force, to the alarming feeling of breath in his face. A dog, its long muzzle prodding beneath the undercarriage to investigate him. If the dog was aggressive—but he was only curious, and when the initial spike of fear passed, Thad crawled out on his forearms, only now noticing the gravel and mulch that pressed painfully into his skin.

            He emerged into a night slathered with edgy, comfortable dark. There wasn’t darkness in the Speed Force, not really. Even the shadows there were somehow alive; it was a twitching, breathing organism living in rejection of the physics of this _other_ world.

            But his eyes were quick to adjust.

            The RV was still unlit inside, and when he peered around the corner everything looked the same, from his fuzzy recollections, as it had when he fell asleep. Except the dog. It followed closely behind him, tail wagging cautiously, as slow as the faintest breeze. When Thad paused, the dog pressed its black nose to his leg and sniffed all over, and with each shallow breath its plank-like ribs popped out in the relief of the dim moonlight.

            And seeing that hungry dog made Thad realize he was hungry, too—for the first time in a long, long time.

            Then Bart moaned, a low and grieving animal sound that tugged Thad out of his memory. The music of the game still tinkled faintly, but Bart’s breath now came in shallow and barely-audible fits as his chest fluttered up and down. His lips were parted, trembling, and the skin below his nose dewed with sweat.

            Thad’s nerves fired up, scalp to toe, dread and weird elation flooding him in equal measure. He stood. Even under the blood and the costume he could see that Bart’s wound had ballooned. When he laid a fingertip on the still-exposed skin, the feverish heat of infection pulsed under his touch.

            _Sepsis,_ he first thought, followed by: _Maybe minutes from death._ And how many seconds ticked by while he just stood there, looming as an obelisk, unable to think or feel a single thing more?

            The room was so—quiet. And filled with light.

              _I could let it happen,_ he thought, vaguely, after a long time. _It wouldn’t be my fault._

Bart’s hand twitched, and he murmured something indistinguishable. From another room, the unmistakable sound of a dog’s yawn and teeth clicking together—Bart’s dog. Bart’s dumb, little dog.

            A cold wave sloshed over Thad and he was moving again, grabbing for Bart’s phone where it lay on the floor. It woke at his touch to a call from an unlisted number that had been running for hours and hours and hours, and he pressed unmute.

 

            In his dream, Bart ran.

            He didn’t run toward or away from anything or anywhere, but he ran. The sun swallowed more and more of the sky, until nothing remained but empty white. It felt good to be in the sun, but it hurt. The light wormed its way into his leg, and it sat and it burned there, dense as a star.

            He ran but he was still, in a great dry field, under a live oak whose crooked branches reached over everything, and the light of the sun was in all the branches. A bird flew over the tree, gray and white and black. Bart understood, without seeing, the way its wings rowed forward to grab air and heave it behind. There was something between them, an invisible string, and the string was air, and for a moment he was the bird and the bird was Bart, because they both touched the air, because the air was the same.

            With sudden clarity, he knew that he was dreaming. If he had learned something just then, it slipped away from him, and everything turned colorful, and the sun in his leg was a brand, a tether made of burning to the earth. He was dreaming. But he didn’t know a way out, or want one. So he ran. He ran because he wanted to. He ran because he knew how.

            He ran because it felt like flying.

            He—


	10. The Interlude

            Max did not enjoy people.

            On a grassy bluff overlooking the ocean, he sat and watched an approaching thunderstorm shake itself out over a dark plane of water. At night, storm clouds were deep and invisible, but he knew they were there—a wet and restless wind stirred the sawgrass all around him; the dizzying smell of ozone was stuffed into every crack in the wind; and flashes of lightning, far over the water, stamped and flexed like a horse ready to run, illuminating the black pits of the clouds and the white crashing tops of waves.

            No, Max thought miserably, he did not enjoy people.

            He loved them, maybe, but that love was like the wind: invisible, and impossible to hold. How long now had he been doing this? Years, maybe, but it felt like lifetimes: the white settlers with their greed and their cruelty; the tribes of the continent striking out in defense; and Max, in the middle, trying only to stay the tide of blood, though this felt most days like swimming upstream because despite his speed, he could not be everywhere at once.

            And oh, he’d tried—he’d run top to bottom on this continent and the one below, through wildernesses that made him stand dead still with awe and through farmsteads thriving and crumbling and settlements in all stages in-between. But wherever there were people, blood followed. Always. It was an undeniable law of nature, real and oppressive as gravity.

            Of course some people were kind. Many people were kind. But it didn’t change the ache of dread that ran all the way down to his core, deeper than any physical agony. Maybe it was grief.

            The ocean swallowed the horizon with crashing, an incessant sound full of oblivion, and he liked how small he felt in its face. How helpless. Here was something—something far more powerful than himself. Something to surrender to. He’d been everywhere here—but he’d never crossed the ocean.

            Low thunder pulsed over the waves, only a murmur by the time it reached him.

            He had no doubt that he _could_ cross it. He ran over lakes and rivers with ease, every day. But who was he to hold this mystery, this enormity, and conquer it? How could one man swallow the whole Earth under his feet?

            The wind stirred, more lively now than it had been before, and tiny grains of sand bit into his face. He wondered—if he sat still long enough, how long would it take the wind to erode him away?

            A palm tree, tall above him, rustled in the wind; its bladelike fronds practically sang as they danced. And then—from within the tangled mass of green—a loud, fragile song. He looked up.

            Illuminated by flares of lightning was a little mockingbird, its black and white wings like fans, piping furiously a reveille of songs it had learned from other birds. The sound stilled Max’s heart. He felt suspended in the electrified air, while sawgrass tickled his elbows and stray, fat raindrops fell on his knee, his ear, his nose. The mockingbird never stopped. The edges of Max’s vision fell away. In its swooping litany of birdsong he could almost swear he heard a voice, just beyond the veil of his comprehension.

            A bright crack of lightning, closer than any that had come before, drew his attention away. The storm was a wild thing now, bright and rapid and loud, though the wind and the waves were oddly still. Lightning bolts whipped through the clouds so often that he could barely follow them all, the way they forked and lashed out in a hundred tiny directions before fizzling away.

            He’d been afraid of lightning, once. The world, it had seemed to him as a young boy, was brimming with things to fear—tornadoes, bullets, mountain lions stalking the edges of civilization. Now, he could outrun any threat—except, maybe, lightning.

            He wondered—if, while sitting here, the hair on his arms and his neck stood up and he prickled with the certainty of someone about to be struck—what would happen, then, if he ran?

            But nothing ever touched him, and the mockingbird was gone.

            He stared out over the ocean, out to the storm, until nothing registered to him but those white flashes, until they began beating out a steady rhythm, a music beyond words or replication. They licked down from the sky like wicked tongues, like the fingers of God probing for something hidden beneath the thick cover of cloud.

            Searching for something to reckon.

            Searching for—

            Possessed by new and sudden vitality, he stood. The sand on his clothes and his hands and his legs drifted away in the soft breeze, and he neither noticed nor cared, because familiar electricity jumped all the way out to his fingers and back again in perfect circuit. An electricity he had both loved and hated in equal measure—his liberator and captor, both, which he suddenly understood in a flash of comprehension were just two words for the same thing. The same force.

            He walked down to the edge of the water.

            The lightning began to whisper his name.

            He ran.


End file.
